Here’s a NY Times article on debtors prisons, focusing on a poor town in Mississippi:
Make America Great Again!!!
When you say “punish” I assume it is financial? I mean its simple math to think 1+1 is greater than 1.
A single person household is a terrible (I’ve done both) place to raise a child. You don’t have the time or the money (or the patience) to do it as well as 2 people
I think the true progress is in elevating people, treating everyone with respect, the right to be heard, and the right not to be harmed or mistreated. As a conservative, that is what I see as true progress. That doesn’t mean I encourage or applaud everything people do, and it doesn’t mean if I disagree with them on cultural issues that that is mistreating them.
I don’t disagree, but I guess where a liberal and a conservative disagree is what constitutes respect, harm, and mistreatment.
For instance, if you think that everyone is being treated with respect, that they are heard, and they are not being harmed or mistreated, then I would say that that is incorrect. That does seem to be the attitude of most conservatives, “How things are is good enough.”
But us liberals just can’t leave things alone. We leave the confines of our gated communities, and we see people being disrespected, ignored, harmed, and mistreated, and we look to see how to improve that. The attitude of most liberals is, “Things are not as good as they could be, and we will work to make them better.”
Do you feel that attitude extends to liberal Dopers here on this forum?
Cite? “millions … kidnapped … electroshock.” Were the numbers really so large?
I never understood where this was coming from. Let’s say I walked into a bakery and asked for a cake that said, “Jesus is Lord”, and the owner was this real anti-religion fanatic. Thought religion birthed all manner of misery over nothing, was a destructive force that needs to be eradicated. Real passionate about it. Let’s say he refuses, won’t make the cake. I am not going to feel like a second class citizen, I’m going to recognize that this person has real strong disagreements with how I live my life, and that this isn’t the place to have my cake made.
The issue would clearly be with him, not me. Again, I wouldn’t feel like a second class citizen at all. I would hastily move on to another, more amenable baker.
I can’t understand why LGBT people do not also view the matter as such. Clearly if the baker has some issue with baking a cake for a gay wedding, that’s not an indictment on the customer. Unless we measure the worth of people in society based upon whether or not a business owner reserves the right to refuse them service.
Further, if that anti-religion baker told me he would gladly make any cake I wanted, but he wasn’t going to do any “Jesus is Lord” cakes, no way no how, goes against what he believes in, then I would really feel like it’s just his hangup with religion, not about me personally.
Which is exactly what the case was with these Christian bakers and the LGBT folks.
What I wouldn’t do, is suggest that he doesn’t really believe that religion is destructive, he doesn’t really believe in all that, he just hates Christians.
I mean, I get it, LGBT people want to live in a world where nobody bats an eye, where it’s not even a thing. They can just be gay or lesbian and the world just looks at them like any other couple without a second thought. Unfortunately, Christianity isn’t going anywhere. Islam isn’t going anywhere. Judaism isn’t going anywhere. All the major religions that admonish against homosexual behavior are not going to disappear any time soon. They’ve been around for millennia. So it’s always going to be a point of contention among the seriously religious.
We are not simply going to be able to eradicate religious teaching that stretches across thousands of years over multiple different, major religions. This isn’t racism we’re talking about here, which we actually have a good shot at wiping out if we keep at it. I think this is just one of those things we’re going to have to come to terms with, that religious people and LGBT people are always going to be at odds, and we need to find a way to make it work, because neither side is ever going to “win”.
Sorry for triple post.
Of course you wouldn’t feel like a second class citizen - because it was one guy doing it to you one time. But what if it was something that happened on a weekly basis? What if every time you walked into a place of business, there was a decent chance that they’d refuse to serve you, because you’re a Christian? At some point, I pretty strongly suspect that you’d start to feel very different about it. You’d get sick of playing “bigot roulette,” and start to really want to be able to just go into any store, and spend your money, just like everyone else.
The other thing you’re missing is, it’s not about the cake. Cakes are trivial. Nobody’s life is ruined by not having a cake. But being refused medical care isn’t trivial. Being thrown out of your home isn’t trivial. Getting fired from your job isn’t trivial. Those are the sort of things that these anti-discrimination laws are meant to fight. The reason this issue blew up is because when this baker says, “Well, that law shouldn’t apply to me, because Jesus,” that undermines the whole of the law. Yeah, cakes are trivial, but if the courts decide that religious belief is sufficient to exempt someone from anti-discrimination laws, that exception is not going to be limited to cakes. If religious belief exempts people from selling cakes to gays, then it can also exempt them from renting to gays, or hiring gays, or any of the thousand pernicious ways anti-gay bigotry has historically manifested.
You’re putting the lie in the wrong place. When a Christian says, “I love and respect gay people, I just think it’s important that we maintain traditional values,” I do not doubt him about the “traditional values” thing. It’s the “love and respect” part that’s the lie. And I know that’s a lie, because I can observe the way they actually treat gay people, and can see that it is entirely devoid of anything recognizable as “love” or “respect.”
This is a false dilemma. Full social equality for gay people does not require the destruction of any major world religion. Plenty of perfectly devout Christians, and Jews, and Muslims have absolutely no problem with queer people - hell, plenty of perfectly devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims are queer people. The idea that religious belief and LGBT rights are mutually incompatible is an artifact of our current political culture, not an inherent feature of faith. If Catholics could learn to stop burning protestants at the stake, then Christians as a group can learn to stop being dicks to gay people. And going by polling on support for LGBT rights, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Where you analogy fails, Dacien, is. . . imagine if you wanted “Jesus is Lord” on a cake and the baker said “no” but right there in the display case were several cakes that said things like “Allah is Lord”, “I love Buddha”,“Vishnu is my Copilot”. and “Hail Satan”. Clearly the baker doesn’t have a problem with religious sayings on cakes just not your religious saying on a cake. Now Imagine that every baker in town felt the same way. And further still that they now will not only not bake your Jesus cake they won’t bake any cake for you now that they know you are one of those.
Now how do you feel?
mc
So a couple points. One, these bakers in question are not refusing to serve them because they’re gay, they’re refusing to bake specific cakes. There are no businesses in the news that are outright refusing service if they find out a person is gay. Point number two: These places with widespread discrimination don’t exist. This isn’t 1960. There are no areas where vast swaths of the businesses refuse gay- or Christian-themed creations. There are tons of businesses eager to gobble up the money left on the table by the other bakery. The fear that suddenly this will become the case, that all of a sudden gay people will be unable to do business just doesn’t wash in 2019. The vast majority of businesses are just looking for business; these conflicts arise out of a very small subset of religious business owners.
There would be no “bigot roulette”, there would just be “that one bigot down the street.”
Well, this is sort of a slippery slope, that if we allow a Christian baker to refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding that this will somehow lead to gay people unable to rent homes or get hired. This is not analogous because refusing to rent to gay people or hire them would be akin to refusing to bake a cake for a gay person outright, which isn’t the case. Arguing that allowing Christian bakeries the right not to bake a gay wedding cake (even if they gladly serve gay customers otherwise) will lead to them possibly not being able to rent homes or get hired is not a reasonable fear in my estimation. Such wholesale discrimination would be condemned widely, and the courts would never move such laws forward. Again, the contention is about the specific product; it is not about a “We don’t serve gays here” sign outside the bakery.
Well this is just anecdotal. From my experience, Christians don’t hate gay people any more than they hate young dudes who screw around with lots of chicks. They think the behavior is wrong, and they voice that opinion, but they don’t hate them.
They’re really not, not if you’re serious about your faith. Just speaking about Christianity, the Bible is quite clear about it. Only by cherry picking Scripture or selectively omitting problematic passages can a Christian come to the conclusion that engaging in that behavior is “no problem”. And plenty of Christians do that. But for a Christian who is serious about their faith, the Bible (particularly the New Testament from which they draw a great deal of instruction) is replete with admonitions about sexual sin, including fornication, adultery, and homosexual behavior. I’m not taking a side here, but your vision for the future requires Christianity as a whole to become watered down on a massive scale.
I personally don’t think that’s likely. I think there will always be devout Christians who read their Bible, read what it says, believe in the instruction, and refuse to waver. As you pointed out, some people stood by their faith so strongly they burned at the stake for it.
I would assume that he feels Christianity in particular is some great ill. That’s his personal opinion. Obviously he’s got a hangup about Christianity for whatever reason. That’s his issue, not mine. Plenty of other bakeries would gladly take my money.
Your other point is a logically inconsistent supposition in an imaginary setting. A court ruling on a gay-themed cake when the owner would serve the customer otherwise does not apply to wholesale refusal.
The whole situation can most succinctly be explained as such:
A guy walks in asking for a cake to celebrate being with his mistress, the lady he’s having sex with on the side, unbeknownst to his wife. And hey, Christian baker, can you make me a really swell cake for the occasion?
If that Christian says, “Hey, I have no problem with adulterers. Here you go,” that’s certainly within his rights, but I think a Christian who is serious about his faith would have quite a problem with that. They wouldn’t want to be a part of, encourage, or have anything to do with the sin this man is engaging in, including providing the celebratory cake.
Triple Post V.2
It appears that, once again, progressives are advised not to go too far, too fast, not to throw out the baby with the bongwater. As if I could speak for all of us, we appreciate wise counsel and concern. Thanks, we’ll take it from here.
My god - parties are not their name, they are what they stand for now. The two party names have switched their core beliefs. If you believe in the planks of a party today, you do NOT get to claim credit for things they did when they had completely different beliefs.
Those religions are relying on cultural horseshit. Show me an 11th commandment saying Thou shalt not be gay. It obviously wasn’t that important to God because he didn’t make a commandment to cover it.
You know there is more to the Bible than just the 10 Commandments, right?
Yes, did Paul screw up or what?
Science doesn’t tell us that there are no significant differences between groups. There are lots of differences, because “significant” doesn’t always mean “inherent”.
I don’t think this is fair. The obscuring language you mention is not necessarily an attempt to avoid talking about inherent differences. More like other, non-inherent differences, and questions about whether those differences are subject to intervention, and especially who should be doing the intervention and how.
You made the rather sweeping statement that conservatives assume that group differences in outcome are due to inherent differences. I will make a sweeping statement in response, which is that liberals always assume that inequality of outcome is due to white racism/discrimination, and that the cure is always up to white people. And inequality of outcome doesn’t demonstrate that, any more than inequality of outcome demonstrates inherency.
Regards,
Shodan