Your argument is based on a fallacy that says that discrimination is only not acceptable when there are other means around it. I.E. a bounty of jobs. No. Discrimination is still discrimination even if it’s an employee’s market. Unless you’re saying that it’s ok for an employer not to hire women/blacks/gays or any other protected minority because they can get jobs elsewhere. I call bullshit.
THAT’S STILL NOT AN ANSWER!
Near as I can tell, nobody but nobody is hurt at all by a church’s refusal to marry atheists, Chinese people, or gay people to one another. Rather than explain how there’s any harm done, you keep dodging the question or answering in tautology.
If there’s no harm done, why do you give a shit about it?
Daniel
I answered your pedantic question here. Further to satiate your fatuous line of questioning, let’s use an example that would actually apply. (Since your little employment thing up above was complete drivel).
Mary and Juanita are two lesbians living in Colorado. Colorado has just legalized gay marriage and they’re thrilled. They live many miles from the nearest town but there’s a church and a minister just down the street from there home. Well, the state allows them to get married and the state allows gay people to get married. So they trot down to the church in their best leathers and ask the minister to marry them. Whether they have a church ceremony or not is irrelevant in this instance because they’re just asking the minister who has the legal power to marry them. The minister obviously replies “No, I refuse to marry homosexuals” or else this wouldn’t be much of an example.
So, now, for Mary and Juanita to get married, they have to find either another church that is allowed by law to marry or make the long trek into town to tie the knot. How are Mary and Juanita hurt? They’re being discriminated against by the minister who has been authorized by the government to do a service to the public solely on the basis of their sexuality. They’re being refused the dignity to go through the same motions that a heterosexual couple wouldn’t have a problem with. They’re being refused by an agent of the government the numerous benefits that are granted by a civil marriage.
Please show me where I’m off in this example.
First, there’s nothing fatuous about demanding that behavior must be shown to harm someone before I join in a cry to have the behavior forbidden. Be as ugly as you like, it won’t change this.
Second, your example is bizarre. Mary and Juanita need to go into town occasionally anyway, if they’re like almost every human being in the nation: they’re not pioneers cut off from civilization. They can make an appointment to get married next time they go into town. A straight couple wanting to get married at the little rural church would almost certainly need to make an appointment, too; indeed, they’d probably need to do much more than that, since most rural churches won’t marry folks wandering in off the street. Mary and Juanita face no harm whatsoever from the church’s refusal to perform their ceremony.
Daniel
Gay or straight, they would have had to go into town to get a marriage license anyway. This has to be done in person, in any jurisdiction. And who doesn’t have the resources to get into town, in modern America?
That example makes no sense at all.
This argument is irrlevant and you know it.
Irrelevant again.
Irrelevant for the third time.
I’ve demonstrated harm already.
Wrong. In Florida, for example, one can order the marriage license through the mail.
What’s that have to do with discrimination? Maybe they can’t afford to get their truck fixed with all of the money they’re spending on their reception. Maybe they don’t have time to do it. A myriad of other reason. What reason besides religious discrimination does the minister have to offer for not marrying them?
Hmm, I think that website is wrong since its information is being refuted by
this one.
This little debate sure would be easier if there were actual seperation of Church and State and that the church had no authority to solemnize these marriages. Let’s just pull the plug on all of these marriages that are government recognized but performed in a legal capacity by a church or make all marriages legal no matter whom is solemnizing them. Either it makes the church’s legal capacity in these matters null and void.
An argument isn’t just contradiction; an argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
Daniel
Your “arguments” had nothing to do with my proposition and were strawmen en masse to disguise your bullshit. Your inability to make cohesive and relevent arguments is duly noted.
Also, I’ve noticed that no one has responded to Cyros’s points. Come on Left Hand, Moto et al. How about you look at the more cohesive arguments to your prejudicial panderings.
Because, you asshole, I’ve already stated my slight preference for what Cyros is calling for. And Cyros isn’t being a monumental shit about the whole thing.
I’m not sure you know what a straw man is, but it’s certainly not what you’re claiming it is. If you want to establish that I’ve been erecting straw men, you’ll need to go a bit further than just making the claim.
Jesus. Why am I even bothering with you?
Daniel
As have I. And I’ve even said that, which you continue to fucking ignore.
Oh, Is that it. It’s a debate when you win with a personality and not reason or facts. I see where I could lose with that, Ms Congeniality.
Do you know what a strawman is? Here. I’ll help you since the dictionary seems to be out of your reach.
Strawman from m-w.com
1 : a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted
2 : a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable transaction
You’re trying to distract from the issue by creating 'em. Go over your arguments and apply the definition. On second thought, never mind. You’re not intelligent enough to keep this debate up. My apologies to your family.
Dunno. But I can make it easier since your refutations are for zip and your ad hominem attacks are pedestrian at best. Just put me on ignore and get on with your life since you don’t like my opinions nor can you even refute them.
No it isn’t, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous pervert! 
St Pauler, after the heated exchanges and your grasping of the point others were making, I find it much easier to see the point you’re making regarding religious officials being among those who can solemnize marriages.
But let me give you another perspective, which may ease your sense of outrage.
Ignoring what a marriage may mean to the individuals involved, and what a church may think of it in terms of sacramentality, divinely ordained institution, and such, the bottom line of what a civil marriage is, is that it is a specialized variety of contract. Two persons of their own free will agree to a lifelong (at least in intent) partnership between them which entails living together, mutually supporting each other both financially and emotionally, sharing sex and normally restricting their sex lives to each other, etc.
Any typical contract may be entered into by any two people anywhere they so choose – on a mountaintop, in a back alley, whatever. It may be advantageous to them to have witnesses to the contract but it is generally not legally required.
But for some contracts, more formality and third-party intervention is required. Sale of real property requires a covenant that clear title can be vended, for example. And most states require that contracts of that sort, and other “serious investment” contracts, require notarization – New York required this for a very few contracts; seemingly North Carolina requires it for far more.
Now, the religion or politics of that notary are not germane to the contracting. The contract is between the two parties making it. But I could see a case where a notary might courteously bow out of a transaction, on the grounds that while the parties have the legal right to so contract, what they propose to do goes against his/her moral standards. And in such a case, the parties would simply find another notary.
In the last analysis, a legal marriage is such a contract between the two parties entering into it – bride and groom in a heterosexual marriage. The judge or clergyman or other officiant is merely the person authorized to assure that the parties are legally empowered to so contract, and to assure that “the terms of the contract” – the promises and vows they exchange – are in accord with what the state considers minimal requirements to contract a marriage. (In the case of a clergyman, he may have other issues based on what his faith believes a marriage to be, but the previous sentence describes his legal capacity as officiant.
My own parish church would marry you and your boyfriend with no qualms, after assuring themselves that you meant the vows you were about to undertake, if gay marriages were legal in North Carolina. But I can have the same respect for a Baptist minister who believes that marriage was created by God to be between a man and a woman (and who may nonetheless have a very low opinion of gay-bashing or refusing you your civil rights; I’ve known a couple with just this set of opinions) as I do for a Catholic priest who believes that a marriage is a lifelong commitment, and just because you’ve gotten a civil divorce does not mean that you are free to marry again – the person you promised to be true to “until death us do part” is still alive, so he won’t allow you to enter into a new contract while in default on a previous one, so to speak. The solution, of course, is to find an officiant who will preside over your marriage – and every jurisdiction has at least one person who is required by law to do so regardless of personal views, and knew this when he/she took the job.
Thank you for the level headed response, Polycarp. I do see the points you’re making as well.
I talked with a close friend during lunch. He’s a catholic. :eek: His father is a former priest in the state. The interesting thing that I did find out was that his father did have to become a justice of the peace while serving as a priest in order to make the marriages official in the state’s eyes. I was under the erroneous assumption that a priest was by default able to marry when in fact, they have to go through the same channels as any ordinary citizen to become a JotP. My assumptions that were based on the belief were apparently erroneous. (I’m not sure if other states are different and I’m also tiring of this argument to go through more cites looking).
He went on to say that in Massachusetts, after it became legal for gays to marry. That he heard of JotPs stepping down because they objected to it. Kathleen Harvey is an example I found online about this:
I have to say that I may disagree with her beliefs, but I respect her integrity that she showed by stepping down.
That’s “toffee-nosed.”
Glad to see culture hasn’t entirely abandoned the SDMB!
Daniel