Condescending Robot, three questions:
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How many people in the U.S. do you think have participated in violence toward gays?
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How many people in the U.S. do you think are against SSM?
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How do you account for the discrepancy between the two numbers?
First of all, I’m a straight man who strongly supports gay marriage (and gay rights of all sorts), but the issue clearly doesn’t actually directly affect my life at all, so I’m not going to judge the level of passion or anger you feel about the issue. That said, I think you’re vastly overstating the issue here.
Here’s what I think you’re saying: If there’s someone like Magellan, whose position is that he’s for gay rights in most areas, but opposes gay marriage, your position is that your response to him should not be “well, hey, thanks for supporting us in all the ways you do, and maybe I’ll change your mind about this marriage issue now… let’s shake hands and be respectful in our discourse”, it should be “it’s evil and wrong for you to deny us that right, your position is bigoted and UnAmerican”. Would you agree with that?
If so, well, I’m not convinced that you’re right, either morally or in the practical sense of what position is actually going to help your cause the most. But hey, your reaction is your reaction, and like I said, I’m not in your shoes. So whatever. But where I can’t at all agree is when you say to that person “you oppose gay marriage? Well, from that I know that you think gays are subhuman, and you are lying when you say you support any gay rights and all, and you are exactly morally equivalent to someone who goes out with a baseball bat and assaults any queer person he encounters”. That’s just a crazy overreach, and it bothers me because it just makes our side of the debate look like insane nutbars.
My position in that particular post is definitely “saying people can believe gays are ‘FULLY EQUAL’ (the words of the poster i was responding to) while opposing gay marriage is nonsensical.” Furthermore, I do not believe for one second that magellan actually “supports gay rights in most areas.”
Yet humans have made that difference apparent in our legal system for quite some time. We don’t arrest people for being ignorant bigots or misguided religious zealots. We do for assault, and there’s a different charge for murder. We clearly see them as morally different.
( “hate” added for continuity)
Sure.
Please note that the preceding post is quoted from The BBQ Pit. Please do not report it as a Great Debates violation.
In the future, if someone wishes to point to a message from the BBQ Pit that includes personal insults, it would be better to simply link to it rather than quoting it in a forum that does not permit insults.
[ /Moderating ]
I don’t know how much more clear that post could be as a mocking of the “whatever hate is, it’s the worst thing you can possibly engage in, therefore hating bigots is just as bad as hating gays” school of thought, rather than the earnest invocation of the “hate” argument that you are presenting it as.
In case you really don’t know, let’s look at what Merriam-Webster has to say about hate.
a : intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury
As a reader, I don’t like seeing hate on either side of an argument.
I’m a liberal Christian, and you know what? I don’t even own a baseball bat.
I still think that’s a bit oversimplified. For instance, I’m perfectly content with there being laws in place against incestuous marriage, but if there’s a brother and sister who want to live together romantically, and are lobbying for the right to marry each other, which I might well oppose, that would not necessarily mean that I would view them as the slightest bit less than 100% worthy of full rights and respect in all other contexts. Same for consenting and non-abusive polygamous relationships, or some performance artist who wants to legally marry her toaster. I do not believe that any of them should have the legal right to marriage right now, but all of them are just as human and important as I am.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t agree that there’s a lot of overlap between people who truly do look down on gays and people who oppose gay marriage… but I think your view of the situations is comically binary. There’s a huge huge difference between saying something about “many” or “most” of a group, and saying it about all of that group…
(As for whether Magellan actually supports gay rights in other areas… well, if he doesn’t, he’s done an amazingly good job of maintaining a consistent, if logically baffling, facade for years and years despite an awful lot of vitriol slung his way. And I have to say that if he in fact opposes lots of gay rights, it’s a bit unclear to me what his motive would be in pretending he supports all but one of them, but then prominently popping up in every thread about the other one and arguing about it at nauseating length.)
(And by the way, are you backing off from your claim that opposing gay marriage is morally equivalent to going out with a baseball bat looking for gay people to beat?)
“It’s OK to be against gay equality, just look at all of these examples comparing gays to polygamists and incestuous brother-sister couples!”
You know, I almost stuck in a disclaimer saying “by the way, I’m not in any way suggesting that being gay is similar to any of these things”, but I figured that it wasn’t necessary. Apparently I was mistaken. You are the one saying “if someone is against gay marriage, that directly and necessarily implies that they don’t think gay people are equal and worthy human beings”, or words to that effect. I came up with an example where I am against someone having the right to marry, but do not think they are unequal or unworthy. This example, by its existence, proves that your logic is insufficient, without at all comparing being gay with being a performance artist.
Please try actually responding to substance of what I wrote. Oh, and keep in mind that I am strongly pro-gay-marriage, and can link to many threads on this board in which I have argued that position at great length.
If your pro-marriage position comes from some sort of amoral apathy where you think homosexuality is OK because you’re OK with incest and polygamy too, then I suppose I’ll take your vote (rather than trying to use phrenology and aura reading to determine your motivations like the “the only thing that matters is whether the person is engaging in ‘hate’” crowd) but I’ll still be rather uneasy about where that leads.
Homosexuality is moral and deserving of equal treatment because it’s something that sane people can do to achieve their happiness, not because every conceivable form of sex or relationships is free of judgment. I do, in fact, disapprove of incest and polygamy, because they’re things that only damaged people do (and in the latter case, your invocation of a “non-abusive polygamous relationship” is a counterfactual that ignores the main issue with polygamy, namely that it’s nearly always a situation involving one middle-aged male and several underage girls).
I don’t want any kind of moral relativism, whether it’s the above or the “tolerant Christian” throwing in the gays with the murderers and the rapists to show how awesome he is for not judging us. Vote the right way and shut up, if this is your belief system.
An overlap of 100% percent. There is no motivation at all to do so except bigotry and catering to bigotry. It is pure unmitigated evil, hate for the sake of hate. Which is why when asked for a non-hateful, rational reason the bigots and their defenders fail to come up with one and just instead insist that one must exist. Which is what you are doing; insisting that some people must have a perfectly rational, ethical reason to oppose SSM - but failing to come up with an example of what such a reason might be.
It’s not, but it’s close. The difference IMHO is mostly fear of the law or an unwillingness to get their own hands dirty rather than any real moral scruples. Most of the ones opposing SSM probably wouldn’t personally beat some homosexual; but the great majority I’m sure would look the other way, and/or in private talk about how the “pervert” deserved it.
You were. Given that neither you nor anyone else can come up with a reasonable, ethical reason to oppose SSM, bringing up incest and so forth is almost always an attempt to equate them. I’m a little surprised you didn’t bring up bestiality or pedophilia; those are favorites.
Really? The “great majority” (those who voted against ssm) of of Americans are like that? I’d like a cite on that because I find the “great majority” of Americans are peaceful, law abiding citizens who abhor violence, of any kind, towards any person or group.
Say what? This is a country that supports aggressive wars, cares little about police brutality, has an abiding faith that guns can solve all problems, and has a death penalty. Americans have a positive fetish for violence.
To be fair, guns can solve homophobic violence if enough gays have them!
Ah, my two pet issues on the board, together at last…
No, I am stating that it is entirely possible that people have a reason that they THINK is rational and ethical, which is a crucial distinction.
Let me try to spell this out for you one more time… I know you’re a smart guy when you stop and actually think and read rather than knee-jerk reacting. Condescending Robot (who is, in fact, extremely condescending, and thus a well named poster) made the claim (or at least I think he did, if I misinterpreted what he was saying, he was free to point that out) that someone opposing gay marriage must necessarily view gays as lesser. In other words, he says that if person A opposes legal marriage for group X, that proves that person A views members of group X as lesser.
I disagree with that claim. How would I go about disproving it? Well, the easiest way is to come up with an example where a person opposes legal marriage for a group but does NOT view them as lesser. The easiest person for me to talk about is me, so for what groups do I disapprove of legal marriage? Honestly, there aren’t that many. So I came up with a few. That disproved CR’s claim.
At no point at all did I propose any sort of equivalency, moral or legal, between any of the groups I mentioned and gays. CR made an overbroad point. I came up with a counterexample to disprove his point. That was all that happened.
You do realize, I hope, that it is possible to make logically flawed arguments in support of a “good” position. That is what I believe CR is doing.
Except that circumstances around incestuous couples are not the same as circumstances around polygamous arrangements are not the same as circumstances around SSM. There are different issues with each, and there are rational reasons for restricting the former two that say nothing about the quality of the people involved (not to get into a debate about them, just to mention a couple: the risk to potential children and the legal quagmires, respectively).
By contrast, we’ve yet to see a single argument against SSM that isn’t rooted in one of two things: a Biblical injunction against homosexuality, in which case people who practice SSM are sinners, or the belief that marriage must encompass certain things such as childbirth, which proves to be a double standard when restricting opposite-sex marriage for the same reasons is not palatable. There’s also a magellan minority that simply, blindly asserts that marriage objectively and immutably means ‘a union between one man and one woman, no more, no less, no substitutions’. One position is a religious belief that shouldn’t be passed into law without a corresponding rational/secular reason, one position absolutely does treat gay people as different from straight, and one position is, to put it kindly, lacking a working understanding of humans.
None of this should be taken to imply that I agree with CR that merely voicing opposition to SSM is as bad as beating a gay person to death with a baseball bat. I just want to point out that incest and polygamy are too different from SSM to use them as good examples.
Who are you going to shoot, the woman in the CFA drive through window, or the Christian masses? I think your hate extends far beyond a few assholes who really have waived a baseball bat at a SS couple.
You keep insisting that “hate” is a meaningful concept or that I am somehow concerned with you using this magic word to describe my position. What can I do to disabuse you of either notion? I promise I won’t shoot you.