While I agree that evil is going overboard, I am confident in saying that I have never seen an argument against SSM that was not either irrational or bigoted. To that extent I believe it is fair to say that such people are irrational or bigoted on this issue.
That is a fairly common belief on this topic on this board.
No one has demonstrated a reason for me to believe it.
A huge number of people, (supported by several hundreds (thousands?) of years of human history), have perceived the word marriage to indicate the union of people of different sexes. The fact that a majority of Americans have (finally) come to see an expanded definition of that word in the last two years does not make the initial reaction one of either irrationality or bigotry.
There is a lady (Norwegian? Swedish?) who is utterly convinced that her true love was the Berlin Wall. She arranged to be married to it and was devastated when her “husband” was “murdered.” For a very large number of people, discussing Same Sex Marriage is the equivalent of you or I discussing a marriage between a human and a wall. It is so far outside their experience, that they simply do not recognize it as a possibility. This does not make them irrational or bigoted. It simply means that they have not yet adjusted their vocabulary to include such a strange application of the word. (And I am quite willing to continue thinking that Mrs. Berliner-Mauer was more than odd, but I recognize that others will perceive the concept of SSM as simply beyond comprehension.)
To say, “We’ve never done that before!” is not rational. It is a knee jerk response that precedes rationality. It comes before any examination of why we have never done that before or of reasons why we should do it. To be rational is to be able to articulate these examinations. This is what I have not yet seen. If the lady spoken of above was able to explain why her marriage to a non-consenting inanimate object should be held equivalent to a marriage between consenting willful parties I would be willing to consider if she was truly irrational. This is what I am looking for from opponents to SSM. This is what I have consistently failed to see. I’ve seen appeals to tradition without any reasons for those appeals to hold, I’ve seen appeals to religion without any explanation why that should matter in a country with a secular government, and I’ve seen appeals to “unknowable bad effects” with no mechanism for those effects ever offered.
The fact that these people don’t look around in confusion when someone speaks of the marriage of country and western or the marriage of chocolate and peanut butter would seem to indicate to me that it is not the “expanding” of the meaning of the word that is their issue. This is further reinforced when looking at the large percentage of these people who don’t wish to grant similar rights under another name.
If I can be offered a rational reason to deny marriage to same sex couples then I will certainly re-examine my opinion but, as anyone who has deigned to provide a rationale so far has provided an irrational one, I hold firm my opinion.
It no longer is 1982. It is 2013. In 2013, there is no legitimate plea of unfamiliarity. People who oppose marriage equality do so because they wish to impose legal disabilities on homosexuals in order to penalize them for inspiring disgust or not being Christian. This is, definitionally, bigoted, irrational, and evil. End of story, no exceptions.
They aren’t the ones who don’t get it.
Just in case there is any confusion, in the famous Loving v Virginia case, it was a white man who married a black woman.
This is where you go off the rails. You are assuming that people have actually given thought to this and come to the conclusion that they need to do this in order to punish gays. You may be right in some cases and in those cased I agree, that person is evil. In the case of the little old lady in Tecumseh or the farmer in Ottumwa or the banker in San Jose who has never thought beyond the initial reaction, whether it be “Icky” or “Never been done before!!!”, these people are not evil, perhaps not even bigoted. It is possible that they are living a satisfactory life holding an irrational opinion on this matter and not willing to take the time to rationally examine the issue. The effects of their decision to remain in ignorance may be bigoted or evil but they are not.
I don’t believe in mushy-headed liberal Christianity any more than in backwoods conservative Christianity. Certainly the latter has worse direct consequences for sexual minorities, but the impulse of the former to apologize for and defend the inherent goodness of everyone, including violent mouthbreathing bigots, is an annoyance.
As I noted above, the denial of full citizenship rights to black Americans based on the rigid color line was a weird American thing. Didn’t exist elsewhere. Not in Mexico, not in Puerto Rico, not in Argentina. Going back in history, it didn’t exist in medieval Spain or medieval Portugal, or in the Roman Empire. In all these places, people of African ancestry intermarried into the general population and disappeared as a distinct group. No need for marches, fire hoses, or special regulations.
Gay marriage, on the other hand, is a radical change from the status quo everywhere it’s been proposed.
The whole point of the Civil Rights movement was for black Americans to have the same rights as any other American citizens. No reason to expect black Americans to view the issue any differently than other Americans.
Incidentally, the OP was transparently racist.
As is the automatic demonizing of your opponents.
You must admit to the fact that it is possible to be against SSM based solely upon an irrational response without being evil or bigoted. All it requires is to not put any thought behind your opinions and relying on the fact that you’ve held them for so long or learned them from a trusted figure to mean that they are correct.
Take our own Starving Artist as an example. Do I think he is evil or bigoted? Not really, as evinced by his willingness to have same sex couples participate in the rights that are available to opposite sex couples. Do I think he is irrational in his refusal to allow them to call it a mdarriage? You betcha! This is evinced by his inability to mount an argument as to why we should not allow them this beyond vague protestations that bad things may happen without providing any mechanism that will cause these bad things or any indication as to what these bad things are.
For those who oppose not only same sex marriage but also civil unions or any other form of governmental recognition of a gay couple’s formation of a family unit, knock yourself out and bash them as being bigoted and evil but otherwise you are painting with too broad a brush.
Then it is not irrational.
There is, of course, a difference between the ability to recognize a metaphor and the ability to actually conceive of an idea. Does your inability to recognize that difference make you irrational?
The people who further oppose Civil Unions is actually a separate case. I would consider the conflation of those separate, (if sometimes overlapping), groups to be an example of irrational behavior.
You are quite willing to conflate irrational and non-rational beliefs. I consider that irrational. 
Nah. You have probably spent a lot of time thinking about the issue, so, to you, it is familiar and you cannot possibly conceive that a person might not have spent similar amounts of time in similar consideration. (You pretty much mirror those about whom I am talking, because you cannot imagine that they have not thought about it any more than they can imagine it happening.)
There are all sorts of issues about which people hear a comment and shrug off without thinking about it. That it is important to you does not make it important to others. A person who has never encountered a person willing to come out as gay sees homosexuality as “other” and probably spends little to no time pondering any issues about homosexuals.
Should we permit diabetics and people with Cystic Fibrosis to marry?
Should we permit polygamy?
Should we permit the sale of individualized containers of water?
Should we ban GMO foods?
What level of control should the government play in Network Neutrality?
Now, regardless of your answers, how many of those answers were the result of any serious consideration to those issues? On how many of those issues can you even articulate the pro and con arguments? The vast majority of people see SSM (and a host of issues regarding homosexuality) in the same way; they are not germane to people who do not know (or are not aware they know) any homosexuals and they simply do not invest energy considering them. Senator Rob Portman is a pretty classic example of that.
Ascribing irrationality, bigotry, or hatred to all those people is simply an exercise in smugness. There are very definitely people who oppose SSM who are irrational on the topic; there are many bigots, and their is a fair amount of evil being displayed. However, to simply declare that everyone who has failed to support SSM is necessarily, (or “definitionally”), irrational, bigoted, and evil is pretty much a classic case of irrational thought leading to bigotry–itself evil.
I do think it’s a bit of an oddity that the black community doesn’t take its own history as motivation to be a little more proactive in expanding their viewpoint. But they seem to have acquired a bit more homophobia in general than other groups (hence “on the DL”), so that may be a contributing factor. What’s really odd, though, is that despite overcoming slavery and making massive headway on other racist issues, they still whole heartedly embrace the white man’s religion.
In retrospect, I worded that very badly and in doing so insulted people who were being well-meaning.
My point was that they were better off choosing a different tactic in appealing to African-Ameicans to support gay marriage, since while African-Americans may not support anti-misegenation laws for many, interracial dating is a really touchy subject, though probably not as much as it was in the 90s when I went to college.
Randall Kennedy, has a good essay on this. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/interracial-intimacy/302639/
moneyquote
I should add, that while I don’t support the view of the third camp, I have vastly more sympathy for those than I do those who object to gay marriage or whites who object to interracial dating or marriage. I also don’t think it would be fair to compare black women who object to black men going out with black men largely do the fact that, at least in part this is a result of the racist stereotypes of out culture propagated about black women and which they’ve had to deal with for several centuries.
What do you mean “the white man’s religion”?
Have you ever been to African-American religious services and compared them to comparable “white” religious services?
“On the DL” is simply black slang for “In the closet”. It isn’t unique to black people at all.
As far as “embracing the white man’s religion”, I don’t find that odd, I actually find that to be expected, given the way it was forced upon our ancestors and given the fact that religion is one of those things that gets indoctrinated into children, it would be a marvel to see it not embraced.
I wish I had some kind of de-programming powder I could sprinkle over every black Christian I know, though. I do believe that if many homophobic blacks weren’t blinded by their brands of Christianity, they would be more supportive of gay rights.
They have no obligation to be, though. They have the same right to be ignorant bigots as any other group. It seems like sometimes I hear people speaking as if blacks owe other groups something in exchange for their own civil rights. It doesn’t work that way. Gays have every right to be married. If they gain that right across the board, it is theirs…they don’t now owe the next group who is striving for fairness anything more than anyone else owes that group. We must do things because it is the right thing to do…not keep score.
It seems to take on a different quality to it though. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it’s a common trope in the gay world that it’s a lot more difficult to be gay in the black community than other ethnic communities. Any black gay posters want to tag in on this one?
Yeah sure, in the general population. But for those who are/were activists or civil rights intellectuals or especially those into ethnic pride, I find it to be very dissonant.
And in general, I find it strange when someone starts questioning some basic part of their upbringing or culture and doesn’t keep going and decide to take a good hard look at all of their other assumptions.
Yeah, jackdavinci, I have heard it said that it is harder to gay in the black community, but from my own experience and observations, I didn’t really buy it. As a culture, it doesn’t exactly fully embrace homosexuality, and we already know how the black church stands on it, but overall, I think we handle it better than I have heard from some other subcultures. I mean, black men throwing their sons out of the house or disowning them…I haven’t really observed too much of that. That is something I have heard of very often in other subcultures, though.
Also, black gay men have their own culture and the rest of the black community recognizes that, and some of us even indulge heavily in that culture. So, yeah, we have a long way to go, but I tend to call bullshit on the perception that we are unique in our hate for homosexuals. I see stuff like this on the internet, but haven’t observed it in my own black culture.
Of course, I can only speak for my tiny viewpoint. I can’t speak for the black community at large.
It is in that irrationality is defined as ‘not rational’. Definitionally, by preceding rationality it is irrational.
The reason the metaphor works is that we recognize the meaning of the word marriage to include and depend on bringing two separates together and creating a one. Indeed, I would argue that unless this were the salient point of the word the metaphor would fail.
It certainly is possible but I’m not seeing it. Perhaps we are operating on different definitions of irrational. To me irrational means “without reason”. Non-rational would be more used when speaking of something incapable of rationality. Thus a rock would be non-rational but a person would only rarely be so as they are considered, generally, capable of reason.
But if they have not thought about it then the opinion that they hold is, again, definitionally irrational as it does not include any rational thought.
And any opinion on the above that is held without any reasoning is irrational.
If I cannot articulate pro vs con arguments and yet still favour an action or have an opinion then it is irrational.
Irrationality is not necessarily a bad thing in day to day life and I believe that humans are not a rational species, we are a rationalizing species. We tend to ‘go with our gut’ and it is a rare person that is able to set aside deeply held beliefs even in the face of the fact that they are obviously wrong as we find one little area where there may be doubt or misunderstanding and hold to that tightly in order to maintain our mistaken belief. Hell, that in itself is probably an irrational belief in that it is based on nothing but a gut feeling developed over 40 so years of watching people.
It appears that we use the word irrational differently and I do not want to turn this into a semantic game, so I will concede your view.
I tend to see irrational not merely as lacking in rationality, but opposed to it.
Used to mean “lacking in rationale” or “without reason,” I agree that most opposition to SSM is probably irrational.
Let us not pretend that Christianity was not a specific tool slave owners used to minimize unrest. There is a reason why African cultures were banned on the plantation, and it is the cause of the Muslim, anti-Christianity backlash during the civil rights movement. I have relatives who have specifically left Christianity to the nation of Islam and real Islam for this reason.