Is opposition to same sex marriage bigoted?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Let me explain my evolution:

When I was a kid, I was taught that gays were bad. Not by my parents, but other kids in the schoolyard. If you grew up in the 80s, “faggot” was a common epithet and anything you said could be used against you to prove that indeed, you were gay. The first oh, five gay people I ever actually met were guys in their 40s trying to get me to come to their house and oh by the way, they had toys for me to play with. Of course, now I know those weren’t gays, but pedophiles, but when you’ve heard gays are bad and the only men you’ve ever seen hitting on boys are pedophiles, you start to associate the two.

So, fast forward to me being 18 and entering the work world, and I met my first “out” gay man. And he was normal! So just like that, I didn’t have a problem with gay people anymore. I think that worked for a lot of people. In an age where most gays were closted, they were easy to hate. Hard to hate people who are your friends, co-workers, and relatives. So this was 1992.

Around 1996, I started hearing about the idea of same sex marriage. My attitude was, “That’s a strange idea.”

Then in 2001, I read Andrew Sullivan’s “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage” and I was persuaded.

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One further comment: I think there are at least four somewhat distinct kinds of statements/beliefs we refer to as bigoted:

(a)“I don’t like black people”
(b)“Black people are inferior”
©"Black people should have fewer rights than white people"
(d)“Relationships between black people and white people should be legally restricted” (this could include interracial marriage, but also people who just think that white people and black people are happier living apart from each other)
I’m happy to refer to any of those statements as “bigoted”, but I think they’re all somewhat distinct flavors of bigotry, and while they are correlated with each other, the correlation is not perfect. Some people are probably (a) without being (b), and vice versa, etc.

Relevant to the current discussion, I think most people who believe (d) with respect to gays also believe (a) and (b). But I think the position is bigoted in any case. It’s just MORE bigoted when it comes along with (a) and (b) than when it doesn’t.

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If someone wants to kill me, I will certainly try to defend myself, but I won’t automatically just to the conclusion that the motive for his attack was hatred.

64

I couldn’t select either poll option. It certainly can be, and usually is, bigoted.

But I have known genuinely loving, inclusive, non-bigoted people who have struggled to reconcile what they were taught about their religion with their own experience of knowing gay individuals and couples. Eventually, in my experience, love wins out and they are able to reconcile the conflict in their minds and support SSM. Sometimes that journey takes a while - for me it took nearly a decade. I wouldn’t call those people bigoted; it’s exactly because their not bigoted that they experience the inner conflict.

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Except people don’t seem to have any trouble at all disregarding other religious proscriptions when they want to.

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Yes, bigoted. Of course, I might be a little biased on this question, I admit.

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My point is that it doesn’t matter. Hatred is not relevant to outcomes; it’s only relevant to legal sentencing sometimes, as a show of immense mercy on the part of our criminal justice system.

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Irrational belief systems aren’t a free ticket out of Bigotry Nation.

And you know who else had an irrational belief system, and was homophobic.

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Even though I support SSM I actually said no. I think there are legitimate reasons to oppose it.

I think a good compromise would be to officially rename all marriages in the legal sense “civil unions” and make the term marriage legally obsolete.