This thread needed some levity.
How would that even be a valid comparison to SS marriage, ESPECIALLY given how overwhelming the very group you are talking about, blacks, who faced segregation, strongly oppose SS marriage?
Are people who support smoking bans with zero exceptions, even for just bars for only smokers to go, bigots? You would stop smokers from just smoking amongst themselves? If that’s not bigotry, I don’t know what is, but that’s the rule in most places now.
I somehow fail to see the contradiction. Just because Minority Group A got justice and Minority Group B is now seeking it doesn’t mean A supports B.
Trouble is, smoking doesn’t politely confine its effects to just the smoker. It’s only analogous if a gay marriage somehow splashes second-hand gay over straight people.
How is a bar that is only smokers going to spill over onto anyone else? So you would stop smokers from smoking even amongst themselves?; How is that not bigotry? That’s like banning gay bars to protect gays from themselves.
YOu could say that SS marriage cheapens and redefines other people’s marriages by equaiting opposite sex marriage with two dudes marrying.
You mean like in hermetically-sealed bank vaults with quadruple-stage charcoal air filtration? No, I think I’d let that slide. Their clothes would still stink when they got out, though.
Yeah, I could… presumably after suffering a head injury of some kind.
These two things have no logical connection. There were slaves who, when freed, bought slaves of their own; do you therefore think criticisms of slavery are invalid? Of course not. Many black people faced segregation in the US, and today many black people oppose SSM, but there’s no relationship between the two.
I agree with the fact that you don’t know what bigotry is; what you posted about smokers has jack-all to do with bigotry. For the record, people who dislike dogfighting aren’t bigots, nor are people who refuse to supersize their meals, nor are people who love the Bruins. Hopefully this will avoid at least three total non-sequiturs on your part.
It’s nothing like that. You may want to take a break from analogies for a bit; they’re not working out for you.
Smoking in bars is banned, not to protect smokers from themselves, but as a workplace safety issue. Folks who work in bars can suffer secondhand smoke damage. Nobody has ever suffered secondhand gay damage.
You may want to argue that this workplace safety regulation is unnecessary or unwise, and there’s certainly an argument to be made along those lines. But to argue that it’s bigotry is to show an ignorance of the origin of the laws.
“You could say”? Sure, and I could also say that hippopotamuses wrote the Iliad. But I won’t, because it’d be a ridiculous thing to say. Are YOU saying that SSM cheapens other people’s marriages? If so, say it yourself, and don’t tell me what I could say.
Clearly we can’t be sure that two plus two equals four, until after we’ve proved that it’s not three, or five, or purple, or clouds, or feline… and everything else.
Really? Can you point to the post where that was laid out with an explanation rather than an assertion?
Perhaps. I have not seen that happen very often and nothing in the current change in opinions appears to support that view.
I am not seeing a bit of education overcoming an obstinate devotion to a belief. I do see a lot of people who really had not given the matter much thought coming around to a different perspective when they begin to actually consider the situation. That is rather the specific difference between bigotry and simply having an opposing viewpoint.
I would disagree on the lack of a necessity of motivation. A bigot is devoted to, (dictionary term, you may substitute a different word if you wish) their belief. All the people who appear to have been changing their views hardly seem to have been devoted to their beliefs; they simply held them as an unconsidered opinion that they absorbed from the society around them and then changed those views when they were presented a different way of looking at the world. A great many of them have supported the gay community on a lot of separate issues: rights to jobs and housing; right to adopt children; freedom from harrassment; rights to partner benefits, etc., and have “fallen short” on this single issue. Nothing in their attitudes or their behavior suggests that they consider homosexuality a disability or a stigma or that homosexuals are lesser persons; they simply have not yet come to regard marriage in a different way than the one in which they were raised.
We need to persuade them to change those views; hurling insults is not the best way to do it.
As to whether you are beating people over the head or simply showing them the error of their ways: I differ. I doubt that one person in a hundred who has switched their views on the topic did so because someone got in their face and called them a bigot. Far more have simply been persuaded by a call to consider the situation diferently or, (more frequently, actually), were led to a different appreciation by someone who changed their minds, previously. No one whom I have known as a bigot has changed their views–despite any number of opportunites to be persuaded otherwise or to have been called names. On the other hand, everyone whom I know who has changed their views did so through persuasion or simply through encountering gay couples and deciding on a personal basis that their old view no longer held water.
I have never taken a stand opposing or even failing to support Same Sex Marriage in my life*, but I still see no reason to resort to name-calling against people who have failed to demonstrate actual antipathy to the homosexual community who simply have not yet made a complete reconsideration on a single issue.
- Granted, I was not out promoting the cause in my youth, but, as noted up thread, the topic was not even an issue for discussion in my youth.
I really hope that anyone posting to this forum is smarter than to say something that is so lacking in meaning.
My marriage is not cheapened by the actions of anyone else. The expression of love with (one hopes) a lifetime commitment between any people hardly cheapens any other similar expression, regardless of the genitalia on any of the parties.
Your claim simply makes no sense.
I can understand the person who claims that he or she cannot conceive of a marriage between members of the same sex; it is outside their lifelong understanding of the concept even if their concept is simply too limited. But a claim that the actions of anyone else has any bearing on the value of my actions is just silly.
If one wished to point to actions that “cheapen” marriage, one might look at celebrities who marry and divorce as though they were high-schoolers rotating through the dating pool or to guys who buy brides from Korea or Russia. Even there, such actions might lower the value of marriage as an institution with the overall society, but it hardly does any damage to the actual commitments of people who profess those commitments to each other.
See, THIS is an interesting discussion. I agree with you that there are plenty of circumstances under which using the word “bigot” is unhelpful and even counterproductive, because it is a negative word, just like “ignorant” is a negative word. If you want to talk about when it helps change attitudes to use words like “bigot” or “ignorant,” then yeah, let’s talk.
But that’s not what the discussion has been about. It’s been about whether the word “bigot” applies to folks who oppose SSM.
Anyone who believes evolution can’t explain the eyeball is ignorant. I don’t say that because it gives me a thrill of superiority to say that, nor am I projecting my own ignorance on them, or anything like that; it’s just a statement of fact. Now, if I’m trying to persuade someone that they’re incorrect about evolution, I’ll probably not call them ignorant, because that’s going to shut down the discussion a lot of the time. But if the question is raised about whether they’re ignorant, I’m not going to lie just to make them feel better: the word applies, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.
The same thing applies here. Anyone who opposes the legalization of SSM is, I believe, bigoted. I don’t say that because it gives me a thrill of superiority to say that, nor am I projecting my own bigotry on them, or anything like that; it’s just a statement of fact. Now, if I’m trying to persuade someone that they’re incorrect about SSM, I’ll probably not call them a bigot, because that’s going to shut down the discussion a lot of the time. But if the question is raised about whether they’re a bigot, I’m not going to lie just to make them feel better: the word applies, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.
[note to stevenova: THAT is how an analogy works!]
I’ve looked. Can you find a quote from Mohammed Ali that stated a support of racial segregation? He was vocal about not supporting forced integration,
As for the Nation of Islam, they were as bigoted against white people as the whites were against them. Holding up bigots to prove other bigots are not bigots is a weak argument.
The question was about segregation. The NOI in the early 60’s was strongly behind Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, and supported black separatism at home. Their reasons weren’t bigoted but counter-bigoted - the belief was that the bigoted white community would always keep them down as long as they were side by side, and they needed to separate in order to control their own lives and futures. It wasn’t hatred of whites as such, it was hatred of how whites had treated them. They were actually willing to ally politically with white segregationists to achieve that goal. Their views did evolve along with the civil rights movement, of course, especially after Malcolm X’s murder and Elijah Muhammad’s death and the advances of the nonviolent, nonsegregationist King movement.
Muhammad Ali was a devout NOI member, one of Elijah Muhammad’s Fruit of Islam security force in fact, so it’s not out of place to ascribe the full set of NOI beliefs to him - along with credit for their evolution.
On what grounds?
If they have no problem with homosexuality or homosexuals and they support all the rights and privileges of citizenship and membership in society for homosexuals, they are willing to work with, worship with, and associate with homosexuals, but they simply cannot get around the idea that marriage, (an institution that has been solely heterosexual for all of Western history and certainly all the history and literature that they would have encountered up until the 1990s), to anything other than a heterosexual relationship, where is the bigotry?
It is one aspect of a very complex situation and you are claiming that they have an umoveable hatred for or intolerance of homosexuals based on a single aspect of all the possible human interactions that exist.
If they don’t support the right of marriage for gay folks, they don’t support all the rights and privileges of citizenship and membership in society for gay folk.
I notice that include that line about “if they…support all the rights and privileges…” Did you include that bit because you think it was necessary, that someone who doesn’t “support all the rights and privileges” is more susceptible to the charge of bigotry? If that’s not why you included it, would you mind explaining why you did?
You ignored me before when I pointed out your incorrect notion that I think hatred is involved. So let me say again: you are best mistaken when you say I think hatred is involved.
Nor do I think “unmoveable” is necessary. That is mistaken. I think an obstinate intolerance is involved.
No, I’m not saying I have a scenario, just that you must wait to hear the anti-gay marriage person’s scenario before judging it as automatically bigoted.
It is a perfectly legitimate point. If opposition to gay marriage is bigotry, is opposition to other kinds of marriage also bigotry?
Can you answer the question?
You’re prejudging the arguments.
You can’t assume that people can’t have rational, harm-based arguments against gay marriage, even if you reject them.
Technically, this is true, just as I can’t call someone a racist until I hear their reasons for thinking that black people are demonspawn. Maybe this particular person has a cogent, reasonable, and persuasive argument in favor of the claim. Similarly, maybe this particular anti-SSM has discovered the objective harm of SSM that has eluded every other person so far, and will convince me.
As a human, though, I play the odds. When I’ve heard dozens upon dozens of people make their arguments against same sex marriage, and every single one of them has an intolerance toward gay people at its heart, I’m not going to hold my breath that this particular anti-SSMer is going to be different.