Regarding the latest brouhaha about one of Duck Dynasty’s stars saying that homosexuality is a sin, I don’t get why people are surprised by him having this opinion. I don’t see why this has made the news at all. If someone is a devout Christian, and especially if they are from the South, odds are that he thinks being gay is a sin. In other news, the Pope is Catholic.
It seems to me that the lesson to take away from this incident is that we let people have religions with beliefs we disagree with, as long they don’t express them publicly.
For example, Catholics believe that everyone who is not Catholic is going to hell. We are OK with having Catholics on TV and in the public sphere, but if any of them is interviewed and says “yes, I believe you are going to hell, as is everyone out there who isn’t Catholic”, we will all throw a collective fit and they will get fired.
It seems a bit strange to me. We either give them a pass due to the “religion exemption” or we don’t. Whether they explicitly express their unpopular opinion publicly or not should be irrelevant.
We don’t like Neo Nazis, and if someone is a self-professed Neo Nazi, we don’t need to wait for them to publicly express what they think of Jews and Blacks to know that we don’t want them on TV or in the public sphere. It’s pretty obvious what they believe in, and society rejects that.
Similarly, it’s pretty obvious what devout Christians believe about homosexuality, and we don’t need to wait for them to express it publicly. We are either OK with them believing this stuff or we are not. Waiting for them to confirm it should be irrelevant.
I think you misunderstand the issue of DD. If he has said “I think homosexual acts are a sin, and that’s that”, there would not have been such a problem. He implied that gays were ruining society.
Broadly speaking, people have a wide ability to hold positions without thinking about the consequences of those positions. Plenty of people say that it’s bigotry to the opposed to same-sex marriage, yet many of those people voted for Obama and Biden in 2008, when both were opposed to same-sex marriage.
That’s because 1) they chose the lesser of two evils, or 2) not everyone is a single-issue voter. Those who were couldn’t have voted for either candidate in that election. John McCain would have been much less likely (~0 percent likely) to do what Obama did to DOMA.
Maybe, maybe not, but let’s not get sidetracked into this issue.
My main point is that religions espouse some things that modern society does not condone, and in some cases actively opposes.
So when someone says “I am a devout member of religion X”, everyone is OK with that. But when someone says “I believe in opinion Y” that religion X espouses and society opposes everyone is suddenly deeply offended and up in arms.
I think people should either be up in arms when someone says “I am a devout member of religion X” if religion X contains beliefs that we despise, or not be up in arms at all when they start listing the beliefs we despise.
I disagree with your assessment of what’s causing the uproar. I think people are specifically quoting his “homosexuality is a sin” quote and being offended by it and by the claim that he “equated” homosexuality with bestiality. He gave a laundry list about what his religion says is a sin (homosexuality, bestiality, promiscuity, adultery, greed, IIRC) and people are up in arms about homosexuality being on that list. I haven’t seen much discussion about his claims that “gays are ruining society”, which is frankly the first time I’ve heard about this.
Because it is possible to be a devout Christian from the south and not be a hateful bigot. It might not be all the common, but it’s changing. And it’s easier to get devout southern Christians to stop being hateful bigots than it is to get people to stop being devout southern Christians. As long as we keep putting pressure on people, saying, “hey, it’s not okay to be a hateful bigot!” fewer and fewer people will be hateful bigots.
I don’t think it really has anything to do with the religious beliefs and everything to do with the hot-button issues of the day.
Today’s hot-button issue is civil rights and especially homosexual rights. That’s why the outrage is about the comments on homosexuality even when (as others have pointed out on these forums) there were plenty of racist things said as well. The outrage isn’t even about the comments so much - it’s simply a way to get a position platform lots of free press throughout the country/world.
That seems to be PR 101 for modern issue advocates. Find some random statement or action by a celebrity or that has wheels to go viral. Celebrities are great because - hate them or love them - virtually everyone in society has an emotional reaction to them. Pretend to be enormously shocked and offended. Do the talk circuit on all the TV stations for as long as you can ride it out. Eventually, there’ll be a war or an earthquake and we’ll get distracted for a few weeks and you can start the cycle all over again with someone else’s statements.
And I say this with no particular criticism aimed at gay rights advocates. EVERY political organization uses this mode today, whether it’s right-wing, left-wing or fringe nutjob. I see it as no different from the “outrage” over Obama bowing to the Saudi king, and those imbeciles who said that it was equivalent to giving Saudi Arabia authority over the US. PR experts have all realized that modern public discourse must have emotional content that can be communicated in a headline of 12 words or less. Logic, reason, context and facts just get in the way.
You use the terms “people”, “society”, and “everyone” in strange ways here. If “everyone” is deeply offended by a certain statement, then obviously no one would make that statement. But it seems that when you say “everyone is deeply offended,” you actually mean that some people are deeply offended and others aren’t. Likewise when you refer to something that “society opposes”, that raises the question: which society?
Not every Christian thinks homosexuality is bad, though. It’s the view of a decreasing proportion of Christians, and people are responsible for what they believe. Also, I don’t think there is any religion that officially teaches that segregation was fine and black people were happier before the Civil Rights Movement.
Word. I haven’t watched TV for years and I couldn’t care less whether a person gets hired or fired by a TV network, but I’m sure this sort of twenty-minute ‘controversy’ is viewed as useful by certain powerful people. The more that the the majority of folks are kept wrapped up by this kind of nonsense, the less they focus on our government’s continual drive to take away our money and our civil rights and wage wars in foreign places.
It’s actually a very good example. If people should be “up in arms when someone says ‘I am a devout member of religion X’ if religion X contains beliefs that we despise,” then they have a responsibility to inform themselves about the actual beliefs of religion X. Which you clearly have not done. Catholicism does not teach that “everyone who is not Catholic is going to hell,” and, in fact, explicitly admits the possibility of universal salvation.
That said, I find that people (everyone, religious or non-religious) is pretty selective about when they think it’s OK to publicly express religious beliefs and apply their beliefs to their political decision-making process.
For example, if I were to say that I am a Catholic, and as a result of having been educated in the Catholic school system for thirteen years, and because I take my faith seriously, I believe in single-payer national health insurance and the extension of unemployment benefits and the right of labor to organize, and that the death penalty is always immoral, lots of my non-religious, even atheist, liberal friends would applaud me for putting my faith into practice.
If I were to say that I believe the state should not sanction same-sex relationships, the very same people would tell me to keep my religion to myself, and that my faith has no place in the political realm.
It doesn’t matter if you hate gays because your dad taught you to, or your priest told you to, you’re still a bigot. Religion explains bigotry, it doesn’t excuse it.
The teachings based on bigotry are one of the worst things religion does, IMHO. And it’s obviously losing the fight, in a hundred years the RC Church will be turning a blind eye to homosexual unions like they do now to cohabitation and birth control.
It was clearly a bad example, since it was factually wrong.
This is exactly my point. If someone says they are a devout Catholic, most people should know, roughly, the beliefs that that person has. Those beliefs include ones they agree with (e.g. “help the poor”) and ones they disagree with (“homosexuality is a sin”). You can’t accept or reject a friend or colleague based only on the subset they have decided to publicly express. It seems to me the logical approach is to look at the totality of beliefs in a religion, and if the good balances out the bad, you accept this person, and if the bad outweighs the good, you reject this person.
But being accepting of a person as long as he expresses only the subset of his religion you agree with, and then reject them when they express the subset you disagree with (and which you should have known he most likely espouses since he is devout) is irrational.
You also have to recognize that there are different ways to handle various religious beliefs. It’s one thing to believe a behavior is wrong and another thing to believe that there should be legal enforcement of your moral position.
For example, compare how people treat premarital sex and homosexuality. Most religious people agree that both of these are sins. Maybe they feel like there are different degrees of badness, but you won’t find many church-goers who say that premarital sex is just fine. And yet many churchgoers who want to prevent gay marriage aren’t up in arms about criminalizing premarital sex. People who would freak out about a gay teen think that a sexually active teen is just part of growing up.
That’s pretty much my position on the issue - both activities are sinful and not something I’d recommend. If I want one to be illegal, it’s hypocritical to not want the other to be illegal as well. But it’s not the government’s job to enforce morality on consenting adults. If no one is being harmed, then that’s really between you and God.
No, it’s practical. Keep people from expressing those objectionable beliefs long enough and you can slowly weaken or wipe out those beliefs by keeping them from being passed on and encouraged. And, you can keep them from doing as much damage in the meantime.
There’s also the practical problem of who would you “accept”? How many people are there that you agree with everything on?
No; when the religion in question openly expresses, even commands a particular form of bigotry, it’s perfectly fair to say that it “explains bigotry”. And the fact is that the bigots are right about one thing; the Bible does condemn homosexuality.
And yes, I know that the standard defense-of-religion handwave here is to say that when religion commands people to do evil it mysteriously has no effect whatsoever.