Yes, this is the best answer given here yet.
I don’t especially care what Steophan might consider ‘bigotry’ or not. Christian marriage isn’t just about romantic-comedy clichés, it’s about procreation and defined gender roles, and a gay couple is flatly incapable of fulfilling what a Christian marriage is supposed to be about. That isn’t bigotry, it is a statement of fact.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I know damn well what the Episcopal Church in the USA is, having grown up in said church (I don’t expect you to have made a life work out of reading my posts on this forum, but I have mentioned a time or two during my posting history that nifty tidbit about my youth). It most certainly is not the Church of England. Yes, it has historical and even current relationship to the CofE, but it is not the CofE.
I’d buy that if the church also forbid the marriage of the infertile or post-menopausal.
Enough with this pay for weddings thing. It’s irrelevant. A church is not a business that just provides wedding services to whoever wants to pay for them.
The obvious one. Tax revenue. Chruches as well as other buildings of NPOs still use public services such as police, fire department, etc.
You’re assuming something here that I haven’t said. Your comments indicate that NPOs get their exempt status because they are seen as a boon to society. They supposedly offer some societal benefit which should be encouraged through tax breaks. This is supported by the catagories listed that I’ve already mentioned I understand that and agree. My simple point is that religion is not by default beneficial to society. The Westboro Baptists are an example as well as the movie “Jesus Camp”
I didn’t say it was and didn’t miscontrue anything.
Nothing is, by default, beneficial to society when you cherry pick individual counterexamples. In general, our society has benefited from encouraging people to form organizations where they can share common interests. It has added to the civil welfare of our communities. This has value.
Additionally, like I have said before:
“But…Westboro Baptist Church” is not an adequate justification for such a blatant breach of the 14th Amendment.
Then maybe I misunderstood the reason you said “That said I do realize that many churches do charity work.” Maybe you could clarify.
Infertile? By all means, you can marry here!
You’re both in your 70s, and no longer able to have children? Fine!
Just don’t plan to ever have kids? Sure, why not!
You’re going to be a stay-at-home father, while your wife works? Come on in!
Gay? Haha, no. Marriage is about procreation and defined gender roles, you see. You simply aren’t capable of fulfilling what a Christian marriage is all about.
That seems like a rather too simplified version of American immigration to me. You can also point to people who left their countries because they weren’t able to enforce their own religious beliefs. To paint the initial immigrants as the freedom-loving oppressed masses is a wee bit rosy.
But you do think your beliefs about what’s right and wrong should be imposed on others who disagree with you even when it intersects with their personal lives. That’s the difference.
No, my whole argument is that beliefs should not be imposed on other people, and that religious beliefs are no exception to that. You can believe what the fuck you like, it’s your actions that matter. I’m also not talking about people’s personal lives, I’m talking about what they do to others.
You’ll never understand this, I expect, because you think some beliefs should be privileged over others. I don’t, I care about the actions. Why someone acts in a bigoted fashion is irrelevant, it’s what they do that matters.
Oh my God, you actually wrote that? You’re so deeply confused I don’t know if you’ll ever get untangled.
You actually believe that people who live by their own beliefs, and decline to accommodate others with different ones (who are also free to go do the same) is imposing religious belief rather than allowing it?
Of course you’re talking about their personal lives. Religion is personal.
Refusing to marry someone in your religion because they don’t qualify for marriage according to your religion doesn’t “do something” to others. It simply follows a set of beliefs.
Yes.
But unless you come out and say that you would like to regulate EVERYTHING people do - such as refusing to choose a mate due to their race, for instance - that’s not true. You also want some beliefs to be privileged.
In general the ‘tax exemption’ for religious organizations is a red herring except in the case of local property taxes on properties they own. If churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. were ‘subject’ to income taxes, they’d just be non-profits, and so owe no income tax. So the valid tax issue is local property taxes.
I support a tax exemption for religious organizations, but I don’t think you can argue it’s required by the first amendment (to the US Constitution). That only literally says there can’t be an ‘established’ (ie govt preferred official religion like the Church of England, what the people who actually wrong the amendment had specifically in mind). It’s been more widely construed in various ways some of which I agree with and some I don’t, but hard to see how it could stretched to say all religious organizations’ properties couldn’t taxed, as long as not discriminating among them or against them all compared to other property owners.
However I’m of the generally conservative approach to things and I don’t see a reason to abandon the long history of supporting religious organizations, as long as equally, by relieving them of the burden of property tax. Almost nowhere is that a large % burden on other property taxpayers. And religious organizations more than most (though not all, it’s true) private organizations in civil society have bringing people together, physically at the house of worship, as a major characteristic.
But regardless if one agrees with the foregoing or not, it’s highly prejudicial to a real free society to have the government use taxation as a weapon to get private civic organizations to agree to prevailing ‘wisdom’ about what’s ‘just wrong’. People trying to use that club against churches over gay marriage should think hard about what precedent it would set for the govt to differentially tax non governmental organizations based on their ‘wrong’ views on all kinds of other issues, depending on whatever 50%+1 of the electorate or judges might decide is ‘wrong’ at any given moment in the future. That’s an extremely bad idea, and wise people in favor of changing the age old definition of marriage (I respectfully disagree with them) should be able to see that.
So you can have conservative slippery slopes but not liberal ones?
I think Elrond’s grandfather or great grandfather was human, depending on whether you consider his great grandmother to be elven because she was born an elf or human because she was ressurected as a human.
And here we have another poster who at least implies that churches should perform gay marraiges or be punished somehow. It seems to me that many of the people offended by a church’s rejection of gay marriage is just as driven by a hatred of religion as it is by devotion to civil rights. Sure they’re extreme (for chrissakes, even Der Trihs is defending a church’s right to exercise their religion freely) but they are not non-existent and I suspect that a lot of anti-religious folks (a much alrger subset of the population) might be swayed to punish church’s for not performing gay marriages. So were the anti-gay marriage folks as off base as we all painted them to be about forcing priests to perform gay marriages?
There are plenty of cases where quid pro-quo get prosecuted. Tax exempts are used in tax shelters all the time.
That sounds like an opinion, an uninformed one.
I thought this was about revoking tax exempt status. If you’re arguing that churches are being immoral for refusing to perform gay marriage, then your position doeswn’t sound nearly so radical as “we should be forced to perform gay marriages upon pain of losing tax exempt status”
Whoops. That first line you quoted there should’ve been “…that it is not enough the the existence of…” The same later on. That’s why I say “likewise”, “even if”, and so on. My mistake!
But I guess the idea still is about ‘conservative’s slippery slope’ which unjustifiably says that changing the legal definition of marriage to include two (let’s just consider two for now) people of the same sex will lead to religious organizations (and their members in every day life) being subject to government coercion if they don’t go along with this in the private sphere. But how is that a ‘slippery slope’? It’s already happening.
It’s already happened as far as defining acceptance of same sex marriage as a prerequisite for a business serving the public (photographers, wedding cake bakers and so forth who didn’t want to serve gay marriage ceremonies for their personal religious reasons have been brought to court and lost). And IMO reasonable people who can take a step back from an argument, and not be in ‘cross fire talking head’ mode all the time, can easily see that. Of course that’s going to be the result of formalizing public acceptance of same sex marriage by law. So it’s hard IMO to argue that that’s some ‘slippery slope’ argument. Where such laws have been passed, some people experience an increase in what they perceive as their rights, but others a decrease. And it’s a value judgement to say one or the other is deluded to think they’d gained/lost rights. There is a zero sum element to it.
And not only this thread but many discussions, and events in other countries (‘hate speech’ prosecutions for strict Biblical teachings) show that there is not much ‘slope’ to go before religious organizations themselves come under the gun. That’s a real corollary to redefining marriage: tends to put traditional religious belief in government cross hairs. IMO honest people on the pro gay marriage side should just admit that. In fact some do, and some are as was mentioned more just anti-religious (anti-Christianity mainly) than they really are pro ‘civil rights’
But not really. A few outliers saying wacky things isn’t the same thing as a legislator actually proposing a law or something. When that happens, you might have a point.
But that’s not a case of RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS being forced to do something, just business people. The only reason they lost is there was no law against discriminating against gays. If they had refused, even for “personal religious reasons,” to serve black clients, for instance, it would have been different.
Maybe religious groups shouldn’t be forbidden to refuse service to gays, but regular business people should be. Some day sexual orientation will be added as a protection in civil rights laws.
So? Just because someone else uses a bad argument for something doesn’t mean the good arguments are invalid.
But that doesn’t actually have anything to do with gay marriage; it’s about discrimination against gay people, full stop. At least, in all the cases i’ve seen, the business owner’s rationale for not wishing to serve those particular customers has been their homosexuality, rather than the event in question - it’s just that it’s not really common for a commercial organisation to even become aware of any customer’s sexuality unless it’s involved with the service they provide. It’s the same as discrimination on any proscibed grounds, and it’d exist even if gay marriage were banned utterly, should likewise strongly anti-gay businesses discover the sexuality of their customers.
Considering that, quite literally, there are attempts, some successful, around the US to ban gay marriage entirely, it seems a little bit unreasonable to point to hate speech prosecutions for some religious speech as being “not much ‘slope’”, and call that a “real” corollary. One is “Sometimes, this is bad.” The other is “We don’t recognise your right to do this at all.” Plus, it doesn’t strike me as particularly reasonable to proscribe in advance the terms by which your opponents get treated as honest.
And cite for that last part, i’m afraid. I’d be especially interested in proportional numbers, if they’re avaliable, or just your opinion if not.
This is sloppy writing that ruins an otherwise good point… Of course not accommodating others with different beliefs is imposing religious belief. What you want to say is
I do this because it made me do a big double take, and I almost argued you were stupidly wrong until I realized what you meant to say.
I’m not sure I agree, though, because the law does get to tell you what you do and don’t have to accommodate, to some extent. Religious freedom is limited by the law. The question is where you draw the line. You apparently draw the line at what a church is required to do, but are okay with a religious business being told what to do. Some people think that religious businesses shouldn’t be told what to do–see the whole birth control issue. And some believe that the government should be able to tell the church what to do in some circumstances.
In fact, you already think this is okay. The government is free to tell the church that they can’t, say, murder, steal, rape, etc. Or to go with marriage, the government is free to tell churches that they cannot have child weddings. They do have some limited control
You and Steophan just disagree on whether a church can be compelled not to discriminate based on sexual orientation. It’s not some big overall issue, but an issue of where to draw the line.
And that’s exactly what makes the position so precarious. That’s exactly why it’s possible for the current thinking to shift towards forcing churches to allow gay weddings. You treat their marriage ceremonies as a business (as they involve paying for use of the facilities), and, boom, churches have to allow it.
I only hope that Christianity moves on from its traditional homophobia before that happens, or else there are going to be big problems.
I do agree, BTW, that a religious organization should be able to not marry people who disagree with their religious principles, BTW. And I think the courts will not stop that. But when the only difference between two religious beliefs is the acceptance of homosexuality, I think it’s more precarious. And if you do marry straight people who believe homosexuality is not inherently sinful, I think you’ll have a hard time arguing that you should be able to not marry gay people who do not believe homosexuality is inherently sinful.
I suspect that will be the actual test once the government decides to regulate religious weddings–is it about beliefs or about orientation?
That’s an interesting question. Would a Church have problems marrying, say, two unrepentant thieves, where they might not have problems with marrying a couple who declare an opinion that stealing isn’t at all bad, but who haven’t themselves stolen anything?