At the risk of sounding conceited, yeah, pretty much. Bigotry has always been a mainstream belief in this country. Ever since the Civil Rights movement, there’s been a tendency to equate “bigotry” with a deviation from the norm of the social attitude. “Opposing gay marriage can’t be bigotry because most people are opposed to gay marriage!” Well, for a good part of our history, most people in this country opposed equal rights for blacks. The fact that they held a majority did not absolve them from their racism. And today, the fact that the majority of Americans hold homophobic views does not alter the basic bigotry of those views. It is, by and large, a less virulent strain of bigotry than there was against blacks, and thank God for that. But it is there, and it is prevalent.
However, because it is the mainstream view, you’ll kill yourself if you get outraged every time you stumble into it. It’s going to be a good long while now before supporting gay marriage is a viable position for a presidential candidate. I was disappointed that John Kerry opposed gay marriage, but I was not surprised, and it didn’t prevent me from voting for him. At least he wasn’t as bad as the other guy.
Our federal government are past masters of this despicable tactic, I wonder if that’s where he got it from. Around here it’s known as dog-whistling - you know you’re doing it, your target audience hears it, but everyone else walks blithely by without noticing.
More news on the Santorum effort to shepherd the candidate from the Green Old Party:
Do the Democrats really claim that these are fraudulent? Crazy, wild-eyed left wing moonbat Democrats will say anything. They’re just trying to disenfranchise poor Mr. Mouse and Mr. Christ.
If done properly. The big complaint in Florida was not that felons were being purged from the rolls, it was that people who happened to have the same name as felons, and rehabilitated felons who had had their franchise restored by official review action, were being purged.
For the record, and completely off the subject but as a parallel example: I was threatened with a lawsuit my freshman year in college by the campus newspaper for not paying for an ad to sell my car. I was 16, I didn’t even have a driver’s license much elss a car, and I had a quite uncommon name – which turned out to also be the name of a former graduate student, with a different middle initial. But getting that sorted out as a kid was not fun.
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Though I don’t agree with many of their positions, I think there are conservatives who hold their views honestly and for what seem to them to be sound reasons. I can respect them even as I disagree with them.
Rick Santorum, on the other hand, is a pewling hypocrite of the first water. Consider:
He is not domiciled in the state he purports to represent. Now, I can understand someone who, e.g., lives in Mississippi and is married to a woman from Colorado, who has a family homestead in, say, Hattiesburg that he goes to for major holidays, but spends most of his time in the D.C. suburbs and takes summer breaks at his wife’s family’s place in the Front Range. That’s understandable for a Congressman in his position and family ties. But Santorum’s Pennsylvania house is completely closed up, his “legal residence” but never used.
His attitude towards gay people is completely and bluntly bigoted. For someone to be opposed to gay marriage because they have a brief for “traditional marriage” being the only valid form, or because they feel the legislature and not the courts should make the decision, is a position I can see as understandable even if not just or valid in my eyes. For someone to intentionally and purposefully equate the love of two men or two women to having sex with dogs or pedophilia, for political points, is despicable. And Santorum has repeatedly done just that.
As a resident of an area affected by severe thunderstorms, hurricanes, and other severe weather problems, I value the free information garnered by my government and made available to the public. Sen. Santorum is on record as wanting to restrict public access to that information because it competes with a company who sells weather information by subscription and who happens to be a major donor to his campaigns. The source for their information?: the same government, taxpayer-supported NWS and NOAA whose right to inform the public of dangerous weather he wishes to suppress.
Frankly, he makes Jesse Helms look compassionate. I’m not overly fond of Casey Jr.'s stance, but he’s head and shoulders above Santorum.
This is the rub, isn’t it? One side believes that they are respecting marriage, respecting it so much that they wan to be able to participate in it. The other side believes that if gay couples are granted the right to participate in the institution, that the definition of marriage will have changed, as traditionally, it has been understood to be between a man and a woman.
Granting the most pure motives to both sides, both sides are correct. And that’s the problem. Add impure motives from smaller groups on both sides and we have a Gordian knot of arguments and counter arguments that just gets gnarlier every time the heat gets turned up.
I do not see this being resolved. I find myself (as you know, pro all gay rights except marriage) tuning out the issue every time I see someone attempt to equate a stance for traditional marriage (man and woman) with homphobia or hatred of gays or other such nonsense.
I know we disagree on this. I enjoy your posts most of the time and would rather us not get into this again. I’ll read your response, if you’d like to provide one, but I’ll probably just leave it at that.
Yes, but so what? Why oppose this change to marriage? That’s why there really are no “pure” motives on your side, because there are no arguments on your side. The purest motive available to you is a simple reactionary fear of change. Which, in general, is not necessarily a bad thing, but when applied to a position where a lack of change causes tangible, measurable harm to innocents, it’s simply indefensible. It’s a clear moral evil.
And, before you get offended, I’m not saying you are immoral or evil. Just your stance on this subject. On balance, you’re an okay guy. Even on the narrow subject of gay rights, you’re mostly okay. But you’ve got an enormous moral blindspot with regards to this one issue. There’s no principled, righteous way to hold the position you hold. Not in the way I understand either of those terms, at least.
Just out of curiosity, what is an “impure motive” for supporting gay marriage?
Oh, it’ll be resolved eventually. When enough people like you are dead. I don’t mean that as a threat: it’s a generational thing. The younger demographic you look at, the more easy it is to find support for gay marriage. You’re the dinosaur, here. Eventually, you’ll die off, and people will look back and think we were all pretty fucking stupid to even be arguing over such a total non-issue.
But that’s going to take a long-ass time. Luckily, support for gay marriage is growing within each generation, too. The issue won’t be fully settled 'til long after we’re both dead, but you’ll live long enough to see the balance finally flip in our favor. Gay marriage will be legal throughout most, if not all, of the US within our lifetimes.
I try to keep that in mind everytime I post to a thread like this. Helps keep me calm. Doesn’t always work, though.
I appreciate that. I’m not looking to pick a fight over this, but it’s also not an issue I can walk away from. I’d love to change your mind on this, but even if that’s impossible, it’s important for your position to be publically rebuted whenever it’s presented. But, if you want to drop it, I won’t hold it against you.
With the proviso that that assumes current trends will continue. While it’s true that people who are 20-40 are more supportive of gay marriage than people who are 40-60, we can’t say for certain that 20 years from now the people who are 20-40 then will be more supportive of gay marriage than the people who are 40-60 then.