Well said, Esprix, but maybe lissener is tired of giving enough logic, patience and understanding?
It’s a shame these things are still being discussed.
MILLER –
Okay in what sense? In the sense that you believe something stupid? It pretty much always has to be “okay” for people to believe stupid shit, because no one else has the right or ability to dictate another person’s beliefs. You can try to educate, but you can’t insist a person believe one thing or another.
But as a matter of definitional fact, if you do not fear black people, feel they are less than anyone else, or do anything to treat them differently or discriminate against them, it would be pretty tough for anyone to call you a racist. Unless that person decides to use their own personal definition of racism and then declare that he is the arbiter of “the truth” and anyone disagreeing with him is a racist or a liar.
How is it inherently homophobic? You, like LISSENER, want to attribute action to mere belief – that a person who believes homosexual behavior is a sin must feel aversion to gay people, or must believe they are lesser people, or must discriminate against them. That does not necessarily follow. You can read whatever you want into it “by implication” but the fact remains that it is possible to recognize the perceived moral failings in others (and in yourself) and still treat everyone as full human beings entitled to equal treatment. And if there’s no fear, no loathing, and, most importantly, no unequal treatment, where is the homophobia? In thought? Since when are any of us qualified to be the thought police?
Jodi,, you are far too intelligent to make such a silly statement. Believing homosexuality to be a sin is by definition believing it to be wrong and gay people to be willful sinners. How can a believing Christian behold what she thinks is sin and not feel loathing or fear?
Or worse, pity. :rolleyes:
Jodi, sin = disappointment in God’s eyes. Can’t get much more judgemental than that, IMHO.
Esprix
Just a guess, but how many believing Christians follow each and every word of the Bible (which in my opinion condemns homosexuality). Maybe it’s right up there sin-wise for them as eating an animal with a hooves. Maybe it’s right up there with the belief that there should be no gods other than the one in the bible that makes all other religions a sin and all of their followers sinners. I’m of the opinion that as long as they treat everyone with the same amount of respect and support their rights to live equally BFD if they think it’s a sin. BFD if they think it’s a choice*.
- (I still contend that, although there’s overwhelming evidence it’s gene based, that it’s not proven to be such. Also sexuality is much more fluid than the black and white answer that points solely to genes gives. And until the verdict comes in that there is a gay gene, a straight gene, and a gene that follows all of the nuances of bisexuality, and that it’s been tested to however many it takes to prove it, I’m still going to be skeptical. Although, if I were to wager on it, I’d throw all my dough in the gene kitty and let it ride. )
Alright, instead of “does that make it okay,” change it to “does that make me not a racist”? And while I certainly have no right to dictate beliefs to another person, I do have the right to make personal judgements about what someone’s beliefs say about them as a person.
I think that, if I were to say that all black people are stupid, I’m most emphatically saying they are less than other people.
Well, you’ve pretty much ignored the last paragraph in my post, where I said that it’s possible to be homophobic and not discriminate or segregate themselves from gays. But, yeah, if you believe that homosexuality is a sin, and you believe that heterosexuality isn’t a sin, than that’s a patently homophobic belief: you believe that being gay is worse than being straight. Like I said, so long as the hypothetical believer doesn’t extrapolate from that belief to the belief that all gays are worse than all straights, I don’t care what he believes. I only bring it up now as a philosophical point, but I agree that in the real world, all that really matters are actions.
I’m qualified. I’ve got a badge and everything.
Apos thanks, you’ve expanded on my thoughts,
lissener -
after you’re done shouting at me (“that’s what I wanted you to see” sort of stuff), perhaps you could reflect on why I’d have posted the “blacks = stupid equals a judgement” thing.
Equating blacks = stupid does in fact give a demonstrative value on the race in question. IOW it isn’t the concept of choice, it’s the devaluation of the item chosen.
homosexuality = choice does not as far as I can see attach a relative value on homosexuality vs. heterosexuality, and you’ve not been able to demonstrate one. You’ve attempted the ‘they’re accusing us of lying’ stuff, but that’s not necessarily true, nor does it really impact the value assumption, and no other type of argument except to suggest that those who consider it a choice may be more frequently from the biblical side of things and attach a moral relativity to the choice (which may be true, in that folks w/a biblical sense may be more likely to see it as a choice, and/or to attach a moral relativity towards homosexuality, but it is not an absolute correlation).
I selected the comparison w/alcoholism because there are, in fact, people who see it as a disease and others who see it as a choice. I’ve can’t conceive (as imaginative as I am) of anyone who would actually believe that race is a matter of choice (except, of course, when one has mutliple backgrounds, one might think of oneself as more one than another, but still it would come from biology vs. personal decision making).
I absolutely understand that you (and others) know that it’s not a choice, that it’s real, etc, and that some one defining it as a choice can be seen as dismissive, etc etc.
but.
the concept that one chose homosexuality does not include a moral stipulation of good/bad/neutral, unless one sees** also** sees homosexuality itself as a negative. Note the word ‘also’ as in ‘in addition to’, ie the ‘choice’ alone is insufficient.
and the negative implications would only happen with some one who is a homophobe (IOW, it’s not the matter of choice involved that makes the negative conotation, but if the connotation is placed on the selection itself. I can choose either strawberry or vanilla shake, it’s not the fact that I have a choice about strawberry or vanilla that attaches relative value to the selection, but preconceived ideas about the item selected. ).
GOBEAR –
Very easily. Christians believe we are all sinners. There are sins big (murder) and small (lying). I am perfectly able to see people engaging in behavior that I personally consider immoral without feeling loathing or fear. Why on earth would a moral judgment (including concluding something is a sin) automatically make someone feel something as extreme as fear or loathing? It doesn’t. And it’s the argument that in every case it must that is silly.
EXPRIX –
Obviously it’s judgmental on some level; I never said it wasn’t. It’s judgmental in the same why that everytime everyone of us concludes something is “right” or “wrong,” we are making a judgment and being judgmental. I never said it wasn’t judgmental; I said it was not in every case, axiomatically homophobic.
MILLER –
What, it’s “patently homophobic” because you say so? They have to feel that the person in question is on the whole “lesser” because you say so? This is LISSENER’s position and it’s just crap. But then if you seriously believe it’s appropriate for you to label someone a homophobe based not on what they do or say, but solely by what they believe – even if that belief does not include believing that gays are “lesser” or
GOBEAR –
Pretty easily. I saw someone shoplift the other day. It didn’t fill me with either fear or loathing. Christians believe that we all are sinners and all have fallen short in the eyes of God. It’s pretty hard to walk around fearing and loathing yourself all day long. It is the idea that any sin, no matter how small or how large, must produce an extreme reaction like “fear” or “loathing” that is silly.
ESPRIX –
I never said it wasn’t judgmental. I said it wasn’t in every single case, by definition, homophobic.
And some Jews believe eating pork is “worse” than keeping kosher. Are they Christo-phobic? A person might believe that one particular choice made by another person is “worse” than the choice the first person would have made, and yet not feel “better” than the first person on the whole, much less be in fear or loathing of that person, much less discriminate against him or her. Morality is subjective, and varies from person to person. Just becasue someone makes a moral choice you wouldn’t, doesn’t mean you must fear, hate, or persecute that person. But if you believe, as you say, that in the real world all that matters are actions, I continued to be surprised to see you, like LISSENER, so willing to label people as homophobes based on what their moral belief, not their actions.
Whoops! Disregard the first post, which I thought I lost, and reconstructed as the second. Ta.
I’d just like to interject here that I thought the sheriff, but I did not think the deputy.
What the hell is with all this “because you say so” crap? It’s my opinion that such a belief is homophobic. Or better yet, how about it’s my belief that it’s homophobic. Remember, you have no right to tell other people what they should or should not believe.
And hey, why is it not homophobic? Because you say so? Christ on a crutch. There is no objective standard of homophobia, okay? No one’s invented a Phelps-o-meter that can give a scientific reading of just how much someone does or does not hate gays. It’s all a matter of opinion: even the idea that there is such a thing as homophobia is a matter of opinion, because we’re talking abstract concepts and pesonal philosophy, not physics.
So, my opinion is that actions and beliefs can both be homophobic, and homophobia is when someone values gays less than straights. Wether they act like they’ve got less value or wether they just think they’ve got less value, it’s still homophobia.
Let’s try yet another analogy you can totally ignore: there are extremely stringent laws in Germany restricting expressions of anti-Semitism. Say you’ve got a janitor in Germany who hates Jews. However, he’s too much of a coward to make a public expression of his hatred, and he doesn’t have enough social/political/economic power for his hatred to affect anyone else. All he can do is think about how much he hates Jews. He’s still an anti-Semite, even he never puts thoughts to action.
And I still don’t understand how the proposition that being gay is a sin, and being straight isn’t, doesn’t mean gays are “lesser” than straights. That makes no logical sense to me at all.
MILLER –
MILLER, the “because you say so crap” is my entire point. LISSENER is not saying in his opinion this makes someone a homophobe (or, that it’s not just in his opinion). He says that is “the truth” and a person disagreeing with him is disagreeing with “the truth.” And while I may not tell you what you should or should not believe, neither am I required to respect your insistence – or LISSENER’s – that a word means something it actually does not mean under any reasonable definition of it. You (and he) apparently would like to define “homophobia” to include something it very obviously does not necessarily include under any dictionary definition. And, hey, go crazy. But don’t expect everyone else to agree with you, and don’t presume to tell those who don’t agree with you that, hey, it’s not just your opinion, it’s “the truth.”
You know who else claims to have the straight dope on “the truth,” with the same total lack of reasonable basis and the same level of annoyance to other people? Fundamentalist Christians.
Well, let’s review. “Anti-Semitism: hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” (Merriam-Webster online). Assuming your hypothetical janitor is not hostile towards Jews and does not discriminate against them, he is not, in fact, an anti-semite.
You continue to insist on (a) construing a belief that one particular action or aspect of a person is immoral, as the same as a belief that the person is on the whole “less” than others, and (b) adding into definitions of anti-whateverism an element of thought-policing that generally does not exist when one bothers to look a the definitions of those terms. By doing so you can then reason as follows: Person A believes Act X is immoral => Person A must in every case believe that people doing Act X are “less” than others, based on this single aspect, and/or Person A must be afraid of gays and/or Person A must be hostile to people doing Act X => Person A must be a Act-X-aphobe, despite a total lack of any feeling of fear or hostility or superiority, and despite a total lack of any discrimiatory action.
This makes no logical sense to me. Even if I believed that engaging in homosexual acts was morally wrong, you could not conclude on that basis alone that I am a homophobe, with no other evidence regarding how that makes me feel, or how that leads me to treat others.
*Everybody[//i] is a sinner. Just because you have identified the sin of someone else, and it isn’t a sin of yours, does not entitle you to conclude that you are on the whole better than that person, when you have sins of your own – maybe more sins, and maybe worse sins. Like, say, the sin of being judgmental, and the “sin” of being interested in the sex lives of others to an unseemly degree, if you happen to be a fundamentalist Christian/Jew/Muslim/whatever, who is overly interested in who is sleeping with whom.
But homosexuals are said to have knowing embraced a thing that is a sin. Regardless of whether or not everyone is a sinner, that means that they qua their homosexuality (which is a very core part of their identity, not just something they merely do for kicks), are worse people than they otherwise would be if they just sinned like everybody else.
“Are said” by whom? Recall that we are not just talking about fundamentalist Christians, we are talking about everyone who considers engaging in homosexual acts to be a species of immorality. So “are considered worse” than whom? I can tell you that this is not the position of the moderate American Christian churches, even those that still insist that homosexual acts – not orientation – are sinful.
The idea that considering homosexual acts to be immoral (without anything else, including the opinion that they have “embraced sin”) equates to homosexuality is the idea that I am disputing. So everytime you all add something “more” – discrimination, fear, hostility, this new idea of “embracing sin” – to the equation, you are straying from my point. Which is (again): Contrary to LISSENER’s insistence, this particular moral belief without more, does not rise to the level of homophobia.
Whoah whoah whoah. Let’s back up a couple steps here: I’m not here trying to defend lissener. He’s a moron who goes into hysterics any time anyone disagrees with him for any reason. Sorry for not making that clear for the get-go. I’m staking out my own territory in this debate. That it happens to overlap to some degree with lissener’s is an unfortunate coincidence that I’ll just have to learn to live with.
Well, in my opinion it’s the truth. 
Anyway, I think that my definition of homophobia is not at all unreasonable. It doesn’t match up to the dictionary, but dictionaries are over-rated. Language changes, and it is my position that the current definition of homophobia as given by dictionaries is too narrow.
He hates them, even if he never expresses it. That’s not hostility?
You know, I really think we agree more than we disagree, I’m just not expressing myself correctly. I do think that some ideas and beliefs can be inherently bigoted, but I also think that its possible for a person to hold these beliefs without being a bigot themselves. ResIpsaLoquitor (I’m sure I just butchered his name: sorry) posted a thread a few days ago where he said that he believes that homosexuality is a sin, but that he was also deeply conflicted about how that should belief should influence him in his day to day life. I don’t think that he’s a bigot: the fact that he’s conflicted about it at all shows that he isn’t. But I do think that he holds a bigotted belief. But, as I said in my first post here, so long as he doesn’t translate thought into action, then I don’t have a problem with that. And I sincerely hope that, eventually, he’ll come to a place where he can drop that belief from his worldview, and I think he’ll be a happier, better person for it. But being shrilled at by the likes of lissener are only going to make that moment all the longer in coming. So when I say that I think the proposition of gay=sinner is inherently homophobic, I’m saying it purely as a matter of semantics, and with the hope that well-intentioned people who do hold this belief will re-examine it, and ultimatly discard it. I’m not trying to use it as a club to beat other people over the head.
I get that, really I do. But what makes it offensive isn’t the apparent judgementalism, intended or not, but the comparison of someone’s lovelife to something criminal or hurtful. It’s like going up to, say, MrVisible and saying, “You know that guy your in love with? The one who’s the most important person in the world to you, whom you want to spend the rest of your life with? Your relationship with him is just like the time I stole a pack of gum from Wal-Mart.” That’s what makes it offensive, and the number and severity of sins under the belt of the person who said it doesn’t make it any less offensive.
Whatever you’ve got to believe to be able to face yourself in the mirror, Jodi.
re: Apos’ post:
I can’t believe my eyes. Sin? Are you mad?
While I’m not sure about the term homophobia per se, it most certainly does labal as wrong something that someone identifies with. If someone identifies with their urge to steal: a kleptomania, then moral condemnation of stealing most certainly IS a condemnation of the person, not just the act.
I’m not saying it rises to the level of Phelps’ daughter, who recently said on Howard Stern that if elected president, she would make homosexuality a capital crime. But it most certainly, to the extent that moral condemnations have any weight or judgement at all, demeans homosexuals.
It is one thing to argue over facts. It’s quite another to make moral assertions about what’s wrong, and then complain when those who are thereby made “guilty” when they otherwise would not have been on that particular score, feel that they are being demeaned and insulted.
Eh?
I don’t think homosexuality is a sin. There is nothing wrong with homosexual relationships, feelings, sex, or anything else. I believe that sin is a concept that is, at core, nihilistic, not the moral judgement it purports to be. That doesn’t prevent me from talking about other people’s conception of it.