That’s one vote for SSM will result in businesses being shut down. Any more?
But they are still not being shut down. They are choosing to no longer serve the public.
Is a lunch counter that closes rather than people who are black being shut down?
No, that’s a statement that there will be bigots who choose to close rather than not discriminate.
Their own fault, they made that choice.
You would make the same exact argument against desegregation, wouldn’t you?
My argument was that a change in the law would result in businesses being shut down. Miller says they should be shut down. So does what_exit.
You added the bit about ’because they are Christian’. That wasn’t there before. I call that goalpost moving.
Nice business you have there. Would be a shame if you were to choose to shut it down.
Because of SSM? No. It’s entirely possible to have legal SSM and legal discrimination against queer people at the same time. Laws prohibiting discrimination against queer people might lead to businesses being shut down, although more likely is that bigots who own businesses will voluntarily shutter rather than just act like a decent human. But it’s possible that some particularly obstinate owner will insist on running his business in a discriminatory manner until he accumulates enough fines that the government seizes his business. I don’t think it has actually happened, but it certainly could.
Absolutely correct, and literally the exact point I’d just been making to kevlaw. So nerts to me, I guess.
You say bigot, I say sincerely religious Christians.
What evidence do you have to make this slanderous assertion?
The exact same number as the number of Christian bakeries that refuse to serve gay people.
You act like there’s some definitional opposition between those terms.
A sincerely held religious belief that gay people should be discriminated against is still bigotry. Religion isn’t a “get out of jail free” card for toxic beliefs. Muslims who believe they are instructed by God to kill Jews are still bigots. Pentecostals who think they have a Biblically-derived right to “discipline” their wives are still misogynists. You can’t evade the moral responsibility for your beliefs by offloading it on to an imaginary character.
We covered this upthread a bit perhaps you missed it. Anyhoo, I don’t feel like going it over again.
My original position was that if you decide, apriori, that all possible arguments for a position are bigoted then all arguments will sound bigoted and you’ll never hear opposing arguments. Your circle will shrink and you will hear even less of your opponents arguments. Eventually you will reject everyone who is not in your inner circle as a bigot.
This is a problem in a democracy, especially if your opinion is a minority one, because the other side will not accept your accusations of bigotry and may even elect a strongman leader to oppose you. This will be bad. It would be so much more effective to persuade them that their arguments are wrong than to call them names.
It’s also a problem on a message board if you want to have interesting discussions. If you drive everyone away with accusations of bigotry, you’ll eventually have no one left to discuss with. I think that is happening here at the straight dope.
This has been fun but it was more than enough for one day. I don’t think I’ll be back again any time soon.
Kevlaw out.
Another reason I would consider non-bigoted is if the person is in an area where it could be dangerous to support gay rights. I’m pretty sure that even in a country without any gay people like Iran ( 
), there are people who would be fine with SSM but feel like they have to espouse anti-SSM statements for the safety of themselves and their family.
Nobody did that. It’s just that the argument you presented happens to be a bigoted one.
That may be a reason to campaign against SSM, but it isn’t a reason to actually be anti-SSM. It’s just that the (bigoted) Iranian regime is forcing you, by threatening to hurt you or your family, to champion the same (bigoted) view that they do.
Good point. I concur. Someone espousing bigoted statements under fear of their own safety may not necessarily be a bigot or believe what they are espousing.
What about if the fear is real to them but cannot be objectively verified. Instead of losing their immortal soul, say they fear that God will literally strike them dead?
No, I saw them. Your arguments were poorly conceived and highly unconvincing.
This is literally an argument I’ve been hearing my entire adult life. “Don’t call people who vote against gay rights ‘bigots.’ It hurts their feelings and just makes it less likely that they’ll change their mind and support you.” More than twenty years, I’ve been hearing this on this very board. “It’s counter productive. You’re setting gay rights back by doing that.”
Twenty years ago, gay marriage was legal nowhere in the United States. Many states had amended their constitution to specifically make it impossible to legalize gay marriage. Support for gay marriage was a minority position, with only fringe candidates in uber-liberal enclaves supporting it.
Today, SSM is legal every where in the US. The President of the United States made support for gay rights, including defending our marriage rights, a central plank in his campaign. Opposition to SSM is now the minority position - only candidates in uber-conservative enclaves make a big deal about opposing it anymore.
And we did that by arguing persistently and insistently that opposition to gay rights, including SSM, was a type of bigotry, no more acceptable than racial discrimination, and we kept doing it until we shifted the entire culture.
“If you keep this up, there won’t be any bigots left on this board for you to argue with!” isn’t quite the slam-dunk argument you think it is. I don’t participate in discussions about queer rights because they’re “interesting,” I participate because this is literally my life you’re debating. The effects of banning SSM aren’t an abstract concern for me, the effects of banning SSM means I’m not married any more.
If I never have to hear someone argue that I’m not deserving of the same rights as everyone else in this country because they have a problem with who I fuck? Frankly, that would be an absolute win for me.
One million percent right. And seeing you argue with bigots here on the Dope is undoubtedly one of the things that helped me get my head out of my ass when I was a teenager, so thank you.
The full form of what you quoted from me starts: “Suppose somebody’s position is”.
Are you attempting to frame that as my accusing you of holding the position yourself? If so, you have utterly misread the post. If not, I have no idea what you’re on about.
I was trying a) to explain to you why I think bigotry does not require animus and b) to find out whether you yourself think bigotry does in all cases require animus.
If multiple people in a thread think your posts mean something you don’t intend to say, consider that the communications difficulty may be with your posts, not with theirs.
I wish you’d stop saying “religious folk” as if all religious people were of one belief in this matter. There are and have been religious people performing religious gay marriages, other religious people entering into such marriages, additional religious people happily attending such marriages, and also religious people who don’t care all that much about the matter one way or another. It’s true that there are also religious people who are opposed to all of this; but clumping all “religious folk” into one class does not work at all.
Actually, you can’t even if the character’s not imaginary.
If you kill your child – see Abraham – because you believe God ordered it, no matter how sincerely you believe it, and even if it’s true: you still killed that child. Saying you didn’t do it because you were following orders doesn’t change the fact that you did it.
I will agree with that one also. They might even be members of the underground.
If one’s option is being struck dead for choosing not to harm other people, but one can get out of it by quitting a specific job, I’d recommend quitting the job.
I could possibly see someone who wanted to completely abolish marriage as an institution being opposed to SSM because it’s an expansion of something they’d rather diminish. They’d be against any additional forms of marriage but not because they are same sex or multi-partner but because they don’t want more marriages to unwind when it’s abolished.
Well then what is going to make religious people lose their jobs then? Being hateful and intolerant?