Some religious people think that sex is meant to be procreational, not recreational.
On many issues, lots of people, on both sides, are pretty firmly entrenched.
Hm. That brought up an interesting article from the NYT from 1975.
I’ve met some people like this.
I don’t see the both sides argument working in cases where those on one side are considered to be bigots. People on the non-bigoted side should be firmly entrenched.
You said this in the other thread:
Have any ferinstances you’d care to share?
For the record, I believed that being trans was absolutely a clear-cut case of mental illness, a denial of reality so obvious that I didn’t understand how anybody could argue differently.
Just because I sincerely held what I thought were rational beliefs doesn’t make them less bigoted; my position WAS a clear-cut case of bigotry. Similar arguments have also been made for homosexuality in the past; those are also bigoted beliefs.
I have seen the language prescriptivist argument that “gay unions are fine, but don’t use the word marriage because marriage means only male-female unions by definition.” I think that’s a ridiculously hidebound position and it is frequently used by people who harbor some soft homophobia anyway.
However the “just use a different word!” line is arguably not inherently bigoted if you are fine with full legal rights otherwise. It’s just dumb.
ETA: I will note on the topic of ‘not worth debating’, logic does work occasionally. Former (mostly) poster Bricker famously came around on SSM after a debate on this board. But it is a little rare.
That was me 20+ years ago. As I said, just ignorance.
Well, yeah: people who are in the right should be firmly entrenched. The problem with that is, most people think they’re in the right.
This sort of honesty and humility are two reasons I respect you as a poster and enjoy reading your posts.
Kudos. I wasn’t much different. When referring to transgender people, I would use whatever slur was handy (way back then, we didn’t really recognize them as slurs).
Then one night, the woman I was sometimes seeing took me to the “gay part of town,” and I spent all night drinking and talking to bearded men with large breasts and a gay drag performer with a knife strapped to his thigh under the dress (for protection–he’d been attacked a few times).
I learned a lot that night.
In my own religious tradition, marriage is something you do, not something you have done to you. So I was strictly hands-off in the whole issue of government involvement.
Except that (in Australia), the whole argument was so bigoted and hateful from part of the pro-SSM side that I found myself leaning anti-SSM just because some of the people promoting SSM and the arguments they used were people and arguments I didn’t want to associate with.
Now, that’s not a good argument for opposing SSM: I was able to restrain myself and retain my hands-off position. But I don’t think that “opposing bigotry” is itself a bigoted reason for holding a position.
In a similar vein, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the people opposing SSM were people who’d been taunted and insulted for their beliefs over many years by sections of the gay community. Including specifically their belief in marriage, and were being taunted and insulted again for their beliefs about marriage.
Again, ‘not believing assholes who are still behaving like assholes only now they’ve changed their position on marriage’ may not be a good reason for opposing SSM, but the bigotry, if you want to call it that, was against assholes, and then by association against LGBTQ.
I must add that there was another section of the pro SSM side here, that weren’t obviously bigoted assholes, and used quite different language, and did a lot of the heavy lifting. but they did that without the benefit of a lot of press coverage.
I’m researching. Don’t want to make a sloppy argument.
This is a HUGE, huge key point. The entire point, in fact.
I “never had anything against” gay and trans people when I was growing up, but I was vaguely against gay marriage for the “intertia” reasons described. Once I graduated high school and started living out in the world, I realized just how bigoted that view had been, and I grew past it. I am happy that other people educated me so I could become a better person.
I had a similar realization a few years after that regarding trans people.
But even though it maybe didn’t come from a place of hate or anything, I recognize it was bigoted to hold those views. I can’t even imagine a non bigoted argument against gay marriage.
Let’s start with a definition.
a person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life
Counting up the responses so far, this would include everyone except What_Exit and MandaJo
The Oxford English Dictionary is more forgiving.
Obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group
This does not do the argument justice.
The Catholic Church believes that
God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. - Genesis 1:27
It’s the very foundation of Catholic ontology and the basis of Catholic teaching on sexuality. Marriage was there from the beginning.
Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. – Genesis 2:21-24
The importance of a marriage between a man and a woman was emphasized throughout the Bible and has remained a core part of Catholic teaching for all of the Church’s history.
Any Catholic brought up in the church is required to believe that marriage is between and a man and a woman regardless of their attitude to their gay and lesbian friends. By definition, same-sex marriage is not possible according to Catholic teaching.
You may not agree with this argument but it is not bigoted.
To challenge this definition of marriage would cleave the Church in two. It could not survive such a change in core doctrine. Same-sex marriage within the Catholic Church is not possible at this time in history. An individual member of the church could not, in good conscience challenge this doctrine and support same-sex marriage.
None of this requires that an individual church member be bigoted. They can be in a loving relationship with someone who is gay and still oppose same-sex marriage.
Unless you are using a definition of ‘bigoted’ that is different to the one in the dictionary, I suppose. I confess that if your definition of ‘bigoted’ is ‘any argument that iiandyiiii does not like’, I must throw up my hands and concede because she will not like any argument that I offer.
I also admit that it does not stand up to the ‘GreysonCarlisle had a buddy’ argument.
If GreysonCarlisle had a buddy who made a similar argument but he was also a bigot, then I fear that all is lost.
Except that the number of US Catholics who support same-sex marriage is about the same as the US public at large–over 60%.
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Does anybody else remember the short-lived poster Melchior? He was fond of making this semantic argument. Melchior insisted that “gay marriage” was an impossibility, like “square circle,” and words couldn’t be redefined willy-nilly. When a Doper pointed out that a majority of society had decided otherwise, he came back with “Argumentum ad populum…fallacy” (seriously, that was his entire reply).
I strongly suspect that there was more to his position than a concern with definitions. He didn’t suggest “using a different word”—he simply dismissed the entire idea of SSM as insanity.
Your conclusion doesn’t follow from your argument, though; nothing you laid out caused the argument to not meet the definitions for “bigot” that you opened with.
That was two non-bigoted arguments against SSM within the Catholic church. Let’s try a third and address secular same-sex marriage.
If same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land in the USA, we can predict several consequences:
People in the marriage industry would be required to violate their consciences if they want to continue in their chosen profession. Registrars, the people who provide flowers and cakes and photographs of weddings and all the people who take part in a wedding would lose their jobs.
One could imagine a tolerant society in which Christian flower sellers and supporters of same-sex marriage could live side by side in harmony but, in present-day America, people who follow their religion’s teaching would be hounded out of their professions by the more intolerance advocates for same-sex marriage.
Those people would be foolish not to oppose same-sex marriage. Their jobs depend on it. No bigotry required.
There will come a time when those same advocates will go after churches for refusing to conduct same-sex marriage. Those churches will lose their tax-exempt status.
The Church hierarchy would be crazy not to oppose same-sex marriage. The survival of the Church depends on it. No bigotry required.