Not when it requires willful self delusions to convince yourself that such “reasons” are either ethical or reasonable. You might as well claim that someone who tortures someone to convert them to their religion isn’t a bad person, as long as they genuinely think it’s reasonable to do so.
And I note that you still haven’t come up with any such reason.
No it doesn’t because there are actual rational and/or ethical arguments to be made for opposing those varieties of marriage. Opposition to SSM is much more close in nature to opposition to interracial marriage. It’s about hatred and bigotry, and nothing else.
Sure, but if CR actually believes that anyone who opposes gay marriage must necessarily view gays as lesser, then the onus is on him to make an argument to support that position, one that actually refers to the specifics of the gay marriage debate. Instead, he just made an overbroad claim, stated his general principle that opposing-legal-marriage automatically meant views-them-as-lesser, and strode briskly away.
Note, by the way, that I’m not sure there’s a necessary connection between “opposes marriage for them” and “views them as lesser” in either direction… for a century after the civil war, blacks were quite explicitly and legally second class citizens in many parts of the US, but were certainly allowed to marry (each other) for that entire time. And whites were just as forbidden from marrying blacks as blacks were from marrying whites during that time. It would be entirely logically consistent (albeit hateful and bigoted) for someone to support legalizing gay marriage while at the same time believing gays should not be allowed to be teachers or doctors or serve in the government, or something of that sort. (Granted, I’ve never actually encountered anyone who holds that viewpoint, but there’s nothing internally inconsistent about it.)
“I think there should be rights that straight people have but gay people don’t” IS, by definition, a statement of inequality or putting one group above the another; your obstinate refusal to admit this simple definitional truism does not mean I did not put forth the point.
someone else made that same point earlier in the thread. If it’s not viewing gays as somehow less , less deserving of exactly the same legal rights , then what is it?
It may the product of generations of ignorance and indoctrination about gays being perverts , but if somewhere in your heart and mind you don’t believe they should be married, then it seems obvious that you must view them as less.
Or, from another angle, why does protecting your perceived definition of a word, and a social institution take priority over defending equality for your fellow citizens?
Sure. People who believe in a 6000 year old earth think they are rational too. Where do we set the boundaries for what is rational. Shouldn’t opinions about how our laws function have some grounding in facts and reason? If your opinion has no grounding in any facts whatsoever, I’d say it’s safe to call it irrational. If you’re unwilling to look at the facts and give them thoughtful reasoning and consideration, that’s irrational.
You are responding to something that I did not say.
I support gay marriage. I’ve never heard an argument against gay marriage that I thought held any water at all. I believe gay marriage should be legal everywhere.
What I am trying to discuss, however, is the motives of those who oppose gay marriage. Several posters in this thread, notably Condescending Robot and Der Trihs are making what I believe to be unqualified, overbroad, unjustified statements in which they are assigning motives to ALL gay marriage opponents.
Now, I have very little respect, or time, for people who oppose gay marriage. I’m quite confident that a lot of them are in fact true bigots, people who hate and fear gays, who believe that gays should be legally barred from adopting, being teachers, serving in the military, and so forth; and some of those are even the kind of people who would, as CR so eloquently put it, go out with a baseball bat looking for queers to hit.
But I’m pretty sure that, as with basically every other facet of the human experience, there’s a bell curve. On the “bad” end, you have a very small number of people who actively seek out and hurt gay people, a larger number of people who don’t do that but are willing to look the other way, a still larger number who wouldn’t condone or tolerate violence against gays but are OK with strong legal restrictions, and so forth. On the “good” end, there’s all the people who do support gay marriage (which probably some subdivisions of various sorts in there), followed by people who support full rights of all sorts other than marriage, and support civil unions (ie, the Magellan position), etc.
I have two important points to make about this:
(1) To use the same word (“bigot”, “hatred”) to describe people way off on the bad side of the bell curve and people who are on the good side (but not quite supporting gay marriage) renders those words close to meaningless. (Ironic, considering that Magellan’s entire argument against gay marriage has to do with some vague thing involving rendering words meaningless). There’s very little point in having a word which describes both the monsters who tortured and killed Matthew Sheperd, and Barack Obama as of 6 months ago.
(2) The best thing about this whole issue is that we’re winning, because public opinion is turning slowly but surely in our direction. Every year a few more percentage points of Americans support gay marriage. Part of that, of course, is old people dying and young people being raised to be more tolerant. But part of it is people changing their mind. Every year, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Americans change from “no” to “yes” when asked if they think if SSM should be legal. That means that out there in the US right now are tens of thousands of people who currently, if asked, would say that they oppose gay marriage, but are so close to changing their minds that they’ll answer differently in a month or two. How does that accord with those of you who describe the issue so starkly that anyone who currently answers “no” is a vicious hateful bigot? (There’s also the practical political consideration that in order to get SSM legal you need to win elections, and in order to win elections you need to convince people, and calling people hateful bigots is probably not the best way to convince them… although I realize that taking that line of argument too far leads to a “hey, just sit there politely in the back of the bus and wait your turn like a good little gay boy” attitude…)
Unless I’m utterly misunderstanding what you’re saying, you’re saying one of the weirdest and most obviously preposterous things I’ve ever seen anyone on the SDMB say.
45%+ of Americans currently oppose gay marriage. I’m going to go way out on a limb and say that the HUGE majority of those Americans BELIEVE that they have a logical, rational and ethical reason for that position. You and I know that they are wrong, but they BELIEVE that they are right.
I mean, those people exist, and they have their beliefs, and if you ask them why, they will say SOMETHING, and if you say “is what you just said logical?” they will certainly answer in the affirmative.
Most of them simply ascribe it to “faith,” which, one can non-normatively and definitionally say, is not logical or rational and does not purport to be. There’s some characters people play on the Internet who pretend to have non-religious, empirical reasons for wanting to subjugate homosexuals, but these people are, at best, rare in reality.
You’re doubtless making some supremely subtle and oh-so-clever argument-by-analogy. Start here, and if you want a literal answer to your question, print those pages out and grab a bathroom scale.
As Left Hand of Dorkness has noted, the scientific evidence for an Earth much older than 6,000 years is overwhelming.
There is the geological record that not only provides a starting point, but actually closes the discussion. In fact, it was the recognition of the age of the Earth in rock that kicked off the scientific revolution in the natural sciences that led to geology, paleontolgy, and related disciplines eventually leading to the recognition of evolution. Starting with carbon dating, (that can only go back a bit more than 58,000 years, but has been proved accurate within that period), and extending to various other different radiometric dating methods (such as uranium-lead and potassium-argon dating) that have all cross-matched the same dates, we have evidence of dates far older than 6,000 years ago. There may be magical explanations for such corroboration, but there are no rational explanations that support an age of 6,000 years or less.
Beyond that, we have astronomical observations, from the craters of the moon to the length of time it would take for light to arrive from distant stars. Buried in the Earth are fossils that are not merely odd looking animals, but consistently appear in the same strata across the world in layers that demonstrate millions of years of development and death.
Now, one might posit a Goddidit answer to all those observations, but it is not rational. At the very least, it violates Occams Razor on many points. It would require that God create an enormous range of animals and then have all the same types of animals die off at exactly the same time and be buried in identical types of clay or sand that would morph into identical types of rock when we have no evidence that most rocks can form in as few as a few thousand years, much less multiple layers forming in fewer than 6,000 years.
I got that and that’s what I was responding to in both posts.
I understand and agree that there are degrees of malice and opposition that should not all be lumped together and that hateful doesn’t always mean literally full of hate. I have relatives and friends that are otherwise good and decent people that oppose SSM for religious or visceral reasons. I don’t see them as haters. My point was that if people are responding viscerally or religiously without any motives grounded in facts and sound thinking , can we call that rational simply because they think so. We have to have a better measure of what’s rational than just whether someone thinks it is, right?
IMO, at this point because of all the information we have and the lack of any evidence supporting opposing arguments I do consider anyone who opposes SSM a bigot on this issue because the definition applies. Even the people I love. The fact that they are bigots in this one aspect , this one issue , doesn’t diminish their positive qualities. It’s just the reality of our humanity and I think even decent people need to realize they can be bigots , and hurt others who have not harmed them.
Remember MLK saying that the silence of good people contributes to the actions of the bad people? I think people who oppose SSM out of ignorance and indoctrination, or just dome visceral aversion to the idea of gay sex, are certainly contributing to the harm done by ongoing inequality. The issue of equality for our fellow citizens carries some moral obligation to give the issue thoughtful consideration.
Now, do I think it’s helpful to the cause of marriage equality to hurl hateful and bigot at every opportunity. N0. I think it’s good to engage people and make them think about the issue and examine the arguments in a deeper more thoughtful way,however, I don’t think it’s okay for people to paint denying equality as just their valid personal opinion, or their religious beliefs make them immune from being a bigot concerning the group they are judging.
Like the word human? There are lots of words that have a range of meaning and need other qualifiers. I think grown ought to know that.
I doubt it. Most Americans are highly religious and base many of their beliefs on pure faith. They either don’t value facts and logic, or openly disdain them. Faith - the belief in things without evidence or logic to support them - is admired and venerated in this country. So no, I see no reason to think that most of the people who oppose SSM believe that they have a logical reason to do so, nor do I think that they care that they don’t.
And I note that you are still insisting that such reasons must exist, but failing to come up with any. Probably because there aren’t any such “reasons” that pass the laugh test.
There’s a difference between “based solely on empiricism and rationality” and “logical”.
Seriously? You want me to come up with examples of positions that I don’t hold, that I don’t support, that I don’t think are logical, but which have the characteristic that the people who do hold them DO think they’re logical? And this is supposed to serve to prove some point?
Uhh, ok boss. How about:
(1) Magellan’s position, whatever the hell it is. He certainly thinks it’s logical. (I disagree.)
(2) The position Bricker held 24 hours before changing his mind and deciding to support gay marriage. He at the time certainly thought it was logical.
Honestly, though, I’ve utterly lost track of why we’re having this inane side debate.
Well, sure, but when there’s an issue like gay rights in general, and there are terms like “bigotry” and “hatred” and “second class citizen” floating around, they should be defined and used in the way that most usefully communicates the most relevant information.
Suppose you are having a conversation about, say, issues and experiences of bigotry that gay people have to deal with in their day to day lives. It may be perfectly logical and reasonable in an abstract sense to describe opposition to SSM, in and of itself, as “bigotry”, but it’s clearly in a different category from, say, people who were fired or kicked out of their houses for coming out, or who have to deal with verbal or physical abuse.
Although I’m really starting to get sick of feeling like I’m defending opponents of gay marriage.
Why isn’t “god did it” a rational answer? We’re talking about an omnipotent and omniscient being who created the entire universe, why could it not create false evidence that proves the earth older than it really is? This all assumes “god” is real and all powerful of course, but if you believe that it seems rational to believe such a being is capable of creating false clues.
*Please not I am not a believer or espousing a young earth theory, just playing devil’s advocate.
This was put so well I feel no need to respond to the “clever subtle” one at all