True. And it took over 130 years for women to gain the right to vote. However, the women and blacks who fought so dearly for their rights didn’t have the luxury of TV soundbites, instantaneous and worldwide discussion and debate via the web. I seem to recall any women in any legislature with the direct power to see the amendment ratified. And I doubt there were very many prominent blacks in position of power to see their rights were respected prior to the civil rights movement. But I’d put money on there being gays in Congress and the House and probably in a majority of the state legislatures. Hell, even the GOP has Mary Cheney. So, I don’t think it’s far-fetched at all to believe (or even expect) that the wheels of progress turn significantly faster these days.
BTW, I don’t know if I consider myself a gay rights activist. More of a fundamental human rights activist. I’m pretty across the board when it comes to rights.
If the wheels of progress turn too fast, the car of progress is likely to run into a tree.
I stand by my point. Society is not yet accepting enough of gays by themselves for gay marriage to be on the table, but it may just be ready to grant equal legal rights. If the gays push it, they will be hurt.
Look, I hate to point it out when an otherwise nice seeming person keeps mkaing what seems to particularly dumb error, but what does A have to do with B? When does Kerry say that marriage being between a man and woman is a value and idea that comes only from his Catholic faith the way the idea that life begins at conception does?
This makes little to no sense. Presidential candidates shouldn’t have policy opinions? Not all beliefs are particularistic to one religious faith. Some, like the belief that drugs are bad for society and healthcare needs to be more accesible, are beliefs that are secular in nature and policy-minded for all society.
Again, when does he say that it is merely an article of Catholic faith? You don’t have be Catholic to be a part of traditional American secular society, which ALSO has for centuries considered marriage to be a union between man and woman. He’s intent on establishing rights for gay couples not because he disagrees with the semantics of the word, but because they are beign disadvantaged and treated unfairly.
Are you one of the ones who are going to be doin’ the hurtin’? It seems to me that there already exists gay bashing, whether we try for Equal Rights or not. Might as well try.
Thank you, I do seem to be nice at times. OTOH, I think my ‘dumb error’ is a matter of perspective. I don’t subscribe to any faith that says that. Those I talk to IRL tell me that cite the bible as defining marriage in this manner. I don’t know for sure if Kerry has ever used the term “sanctity of marriage,” but if he has there’s an indication of religious basis. Kerry stops short of saying that it’s his Catholic faith that gives him this belief (the way he did on the abortion issue). But if its not based on faith for him, I’d like to know what his belief is founded upon, other than “that’s the way it has always been.”
No, of course they should hold policy opinions. And protecting the “sanctity of marriage” crosses many faiths. It’s not just the Christian Right and Catholics that take this position. I’ve gotten no indication that the belief that marriage should only be between man and woman is a secular belief.
Again, he doesn’t say it. But he doesn’t say that it’s not. What is American secular society? I see “In God we trust on my money.” My daughter pledges her allegiance “under God” in school. Our president makes his oath of office with one hand on the bible. And both candidates regularly bid us well by saying “God bless America.” Saying America is a secular society doesn’t make it so. Further, what centuries-old legal document defines marriage in this manner? There isn’t one, which is why they’re trying so hard to make one now.
With all due respect, Apos, I’m only pointing this out because I’m uncomfortable with his tenuous position. To many he’s a flip-flopper. I don’t agree with most of those assessments, but in this instance, to me, he does appear to be contradictory. I think he’s skirting the edge primarily he’s forced into it by popular opinion. That’s sad. I’d have been more pleased if he applied the same logic to this issue as he did to the abortion issue or at least explained why we should accept this logic or at least avoided making a statement that is most likely grounded in faith.
Stonewall happened because people were getting hurt and were tired of it. Sodomy laws were discontinued because some people refused to shut up and hide. They got tired of having the local police bust into their homes for no reason other than to hassle them. People get bashed - beat up, taunted, killed already. It still happens. This sounds too much like “shut up, salute the flag and accept whatever we choose to give or not give you”.
So if he stops short of saying it, why do you speak about the issue as if he HAD said it. There is far more to “that’s the way it has always been” than can be rightly dismissed with a wave of the hand. Social institutions and traditions are important. You can recognize that and still be for gay marriage.
But it is. It’s both. And you have to admit: not wanting to legislate Catholic doctrine is a lot different from not wanting to legislate more universal social values that have been strongly influenced but are not directly tied to, Christianity in general.
Right: because no one ever even envisioned that they’d HAVE to defend that concept of marriage: it was so taken for granted. That fact should make you even MORE wary of acting as if marriage was a nothing that we can simply mold into anything we want without upset or disruption.
But his position, while perhaps not exactly the same as mine, is anything but tenuous. It’s both sincere and consistent over decades.
Again, how so?
I think you’re more sad that he doesn’t agree with you entirely, and the only way you can rationalize that is to pretend that he doesn’t REALLY mean it: that’s it’s a ploy. Again: I don’t think it is a ploy.
But you still haven’t presented any argument or evidence that he has NOT applied the same logic, or at least even that the situations are similar enough to warrant the same logic. I don’t see that they are similar. The idea that life/ensoulment begins at conception is Catholic doctrine. The idea that marriages are unions between men and women is tradional social value that is far more universal and societal than merely being religious doctrine. It’s just not the same deal.
To the folks who are asking us why we would vote for Kerry given that he doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage either, I feel like I should spam the following paragraph in every thread that even mentions the subject in conjunction with the election. (I don’t feel like getting banned, though, so I won’t)
We cannot afford to compare Kerry/Edwards to the ideal. The uber-liberal wing of the Democratic party did that last election, and we got Bush for four years. We have to compare them with the only other probable alternative. And compared to Bush/Cheney, Kerry/Edwards is awfully close to the ideal…
It’s intriguing to have the discussion on “Christian doctrine on the sanctity of marriage” come up in this thread – just this morning, Barb and I were treated to the announcement that on Wednesday evening and after service next Sunday, there will be two public meetings for our parish discussing what the Vestry has put together as policy for “ceremonies of covenanted union.” The language is important, and for two reasons: (1) it’s illegal to call a church blessing of what would be an illegal marriage in North Carolina a “marriage ceremony,” and (2) the intent is to not merely include same-sex unions but other relationships that God has blessed and the Church ought to echo that blessing, but which do not have a legal imprimatur. On another board, I recently encountered an echo of what we had with Chris in the taking in by a couple (who had two adult daughters but no sons of their body) of their abused nephew, who found in the man the loving father he had dreamed of having and did not have in his abusive father-by-blood, and who became the son they had never had. God knows we and they had every reason to celebrate that family-making bond, even though they never had any legal paperwork, and our “legal paperwork” was confined to a handwritten note from Chris’s mother giving us the right to consent to schooling and emergency medical treatment for Chris in her absence.
Here’s our Bishop’s Pastoral Statement on blessings of committed same-sex unions within our diocese. It’s sensitively written, to commend such blessings but not to command them, owing to the differences of opinion across the diocese on this issue. Following is the 2000 resolution that sets policy for The Episcopal Church on this issue – I think it’s important enough to be quoted in full here:
The text of the 2003 resolution further implementing this and acknowledging the differences of opinion that exist within the Episcopal Church is found on the Virginia chapter of Integrity website here. (Cursor down the maroon text below the yellow block explaining what it was substituted for. This was up for some time on the national church website, along with other 2003 resolutions, but seems to have been taken down in website reorganization since.)
Yes, and if the gay rights movement had only started yesterday, you might have a point.
Okay, first, it took one hundred years to go from slavery to equal rights. Prior to 1962, gay people were not enslaved. In fact, no group in American history has never been as completely disenfranchised as African slaves. Gays have certainly never come as close. So I don’t think that, considering the leg up gays have had over blacks in the civil rights front, that forty years is an unreasonably short period of time to expect this sort of change to occur.
In fact, you could mount a fairly strong argument that, by the sixties, the state of black civil rights and the state of gay civil rights were roughly equal: both groups were routinely barred from employment, housing, and the right to marry freely. Forty years later, our society has eliminated almost all of those barriers for blacks. But when gays ask why those barriers still exsist for them, it’s “Don’t push so hard! Give it time! Society isn’t ready!” No, society isn’t ready. And left to its own devices, it will never be ready. Nobody gives rights away: they have to be fought for. If gays don’t push, and push hard, then nothing will ever change.
I also entirely disagree with the notion that gays are “more different” from straights than blacks are from whites. Total bullshit. There is no fundamental difference between a straight man and a gay man, no more than there is between a white man and a black man, and I find the inference to the contrary to be vaguely insulting.
Perhaps the chance of getting hurt is seen as an acceptable risk. Hell, even 100 years after slavery had ended, blacks STILL risked getting hurt, and still they fought for their rights-which were way beyond overdue. And many of them fucking died for them.
NO ONE should have to wait that long. If people waited for it to be “acceptable” for them to have civil rights, then we wouldn’t have gotten a lot accomplished, would we?
Society be damned-a hell of a lot of people weren’t ready for segregation to end. Tough shit for them. And tough shit for the homophobes now.
If it were about “what makes gays so special” it’d be different. It’s about equality. And fortunately, a lot of people learned a lot of things from the civil rights movement so we don’t have to go through all the same shit again just to prove that people deserve to be treated fairly.
How much will society accept? Why don’t we give it a try and find out. I’m sure that there are plenty of morons out there who say that gays have “choice to be different” and that gay people are so different from them that civil rights aren’t an issue for them. And I say they can go fuck themselves. Along with anyone who says that the gays be gettin’ all uppity and they should just shut their mouths and wait their turn.
Maybe you’d care to explain how gays are “so different from straight people” that warrants the wait-and-see process while thousands of people live their lives and die having their most important relationships trivialized and mocked and scorned by society? Maybe you want to tell us what the difference is, that’s different enough we don’t deserve what these alien straight people have?
But SolGrundy, aren’t you a bunch of lisping, prancy fairy boys who have indiscriminate and often anonymous sex with a different guy every night at those gay bars called “Jackhammer” and “Manhole”? Aren’t you all wearing women’s clothes or tight T-shirts and arranging flowers and doing interior decorating by day before taking lots of drugs and catching HIV at night? Don’t you all have a FAB-ulous fashion sense like Carson and use 12 “girly” facial products like Kyan? (MMMmmm…Kyan…)
Yes, of course, I’m kidding. (Well, except for the names of the clubs, unfortuately!) I know that there are only a small minority of gays who even remotely fit that stereotype - just as there are a minority of straight men who are beer-swilling wifebeaters with a sixth grade education.
But I’m afraid that many people, especially meat-and-potatoes midwesterners, still see this as the truth, and don’t think nancy-boy is anything like them in any way that would make marriage a good idea. Even if they don’t hate them, they don’t understand that “lifestyle” or see what role marriage would play in it, other than short-term and essentially meaningless.
But I also don’t think that will change until people realize that their attorney, their doctor, or their neighbor may in fact be gay - and be exactly the kind of “normal” person who would be a wonderful, productive husband. And the attornies, doctors and neighbors are keeping pretty quiet about their orientation, because they’re going slow so as not to “push it.”
But it’s not helping.
Social revolution hurts. It bleeds, and sometimes people even die. But sometimes death as a man is preferable to life as a ghost.
Tiny lisping voice from the corner begging you to remember that lisping, prancing, being a fairy, frequent and/or anonymous sex, bars with alarming names, women’s clothes, tight T-shirts, flower arranging, interior decorating, fabulous fashion sense, and facial products are not individually or severally comparable to beating one’s wife or having a poor education.
Yes, I know you were agreeing with me. Just wanted to get my bit in.
Oh, Matt, Matt, you’re going to make me work harder, aren’t you? OK, I admit I was using shorthand stereotypes on both sides. To even out the stereotypes to weird but essentially harmless things:
…just as there are a minority of straight men who are grunting monosyllabic apes who can’t dance for shit, love NASCAR and football, tinkering with their pickup trucks on a Sunday afternoon, beginning household projects without ever finishing them, wear the same stained T-shirt for a week without showering and shave with rusty disposable razors - twice a month.
OK, I admit I was using shorthand stereotypes on both sides. To even out the stereotypes to weird but essentially harmless things: