If you are not from that religion, the you should not be subject to the beliefs of those who are.
Right, a bigoted religion.
You are using a definition of bigot that I am unfamiliar with. Care to share it with the group?
Fundamentally there are two types of marriage, at least in most Western nations. There’s the religious kind, which is pretty much wholly within one’s religion, and then there’s the legal marriage, which is basically for purposes of economic union and inheritance.
The catch is that for the most part, anti-gay marriage people are conflating the two together; AFAIK if you go get married at the courthouse, that doesn’t hold a lot of religious water and the same is true if you get married in a religious ceremony without the appropriate marriage license signed by the celebrant.
Most ceremonies in the US anyway, are a combination of the two- you go a few days beforehand and get your license from the state, and you have your religious ceremony, and your priest/deacon/pastor/imam/rabbi signs the license afterward, thereby completing the governmental part.
There’s no reason to be against gay marriage from a strictly secular point of view; in practical terms it is just extending the existing spousal rights and inheritance rules to same sex people. Prior to the legalization of gay marriage, someone’s gay life partner wasn’t legally considered any different than any other friend, and the way that the laws worked is that inheritance, the ability to make medical decisions for an incapacitated person, etc… all went to the next of kin, not that person’s partner. Unless of course, they’d gone to a pretty long and involved AND not as ironclad procedure to transfer all that stuff to their partner. Legalizing gay marriage just extended the normal spousal privileges in those ways to gay spouses.
Which really is nobody else’s business who they want their stuff to go to when they die, or who gets to make the decisions for them if they’re gravely ill. And it doesn’t square them up with whatever religions are out there either.
Which is why I’ve never quite understood the opposition- it strikes me as inherently hateful and bigoted when there’s no reason for it. I mean, if you’re part of some Christian church that is against gay marriage, you’re not going to recognize that gay marriage regardless of what the government says, so why do you care about it, other than wanting to be hateful and penalize gay people?
Because, if SSM becomes legal, religious folk will start to lose their jobs and, possibly in the future, incur financial penalties.
But, if SSM remains illegal, it will lead to the stigmatization of homosexuality. It will lead to people who are forced to live their lives hiding who they really are, it will lead to teenagers so distraught when they realize they are attracted to the same gender that they kill themselves, and it will lead to rampant homophobia including the murder of gay people.
See how we can both play the slippery slope game? The advantage my slippery slope has is, that it actually happened. In real life. For the last few thousand years.
What clergymen have been fired because of SSM being legalized, exactly?
Given how many places have legalized SSM, and that those places do not seem to have seen religious folks lose their jobs, I am curious as to what your logic here is.
I mean, this isn’t a hypothetical. This is something that has happened in real life, and we don’t have droves of unemployed religious people.
Yes. This is bad. It’s a good argument in favour of SSM.
However, the previous poster asked about arguments against SSM.
There are certainly photographers, bakers and florists who can longer offer wedding services since SSM became legal.
Why can’t they?
And why can’t photographers, bakers and florists refuse to service interracial couples on religious grounds?
How is that going to happen exactly? Are you saying that people are somehow going to lose confidence in their religion if their leaders can’t coerce secular authorities into doing their bidding?
That’s absurd; there are LOTS of examples where the government and religious leaders of all faiths are at odds with one another; it’s part and parcel of the separation of church and state.
Beyond that, SSM has been legal for what… six years now? Point at some religious people who’ve lost their jobs because of SSM. I’m not convinced it’s an issue.
Because the government has said that they can be longer offer wedding services unless they offer them to same-sex couples
I don’t know. Are there religious grounds for refusing service to interracial couples? I am not familiar with them.
I am unaware of any religion that prohibits someone from selling a cake to a gay couple. They’re not being asked to enter a gay marriage themselves.
How many Christians own bakeries? How many have had to shut down due to gay marriage being legal? If those numbers aren’t pretty close together, doesn’t that tell you something?
I am not.
What you are familiar with is irrelevant. America decided a while ago that the rights of interracial couples trump the ‘’‘religious’’’ rights of bigots.
Me neither.
I do know of at least one baker that objected to designing a cake for a same-sex wedding on religious grounds and had to shut down as a result.
What’s an acceptable number of Christian bakeries shut down?
How is this relevant to the discussion?
If they use their religion as an excuse to be bigots, probably all.
If they chose to shut their bakery down, c’est la vie. They could have chosen to provide the cake, which is a violation of no commandment. Christians seem to have no problem providing a countless number of other products and services to non-Christians, gay people, and people who disagree with any number of Christian points of faith or dogma. If a Christian wishes to stand on a personal principle and shut their bakery down instead of serving a customer, that’s entirely their decision.