I view their their fears of vilification,
with floccinaucinihilipilification.
-Bryan Ekers, 2015
Dammit, my chance at immortality and I double-type “their”.
Well, let future scholars ponder the mysteries of Ekers, as they will the rest of my no-doubt storied life.
for what it’s worth, I have two Facebook friends that are ordained ministers. One is Episcopalian and is an associate pastor at a very large mainstream church. The other is a Baptist minister at a very small church.
So I was curious about their take on the SSM ruling but I didn’t have to look far as both of them had put those ubiquitous Facebook rainbows over their profile pictures. The woman that was the Baptist minister seemed particularly involved, she had several post on the subject and talked about some of the ceremonies she had performed. My Moms’ Episcopalian church ( which is how I know the other minister ) has performed same sex commitment ceremonies for a while now and will probably move on to marriages now that they are legal. IIRC, one of their other associate pastors is a married gay man.
My take is that no court or government is going to ever force a church, through tax laws or otherwise, to perform SSM ceremonies against their will but over time their position will change and more and more of them will do so until it becomes the rule, not the exception.
adaher has so far ignored this post, which makes the pro-gay case.
(Ok, he addressed the divorce part.)
You can be a strict literalist Biblist and still support sanctioned gay marriage. Though I’ve opined upthread that such an interpretation is problematic, as is the opposite one.
The problem is the gospels didn’t say anything about gay sex (or abortion). The gospels had quite a bit to say about being a sanctimonious prick. Paul’s remarks are couched in the context of an ad hominem attack on those outside of their community. It’s reasonable to think of Paul’s slur as a shorthand for the sorts of immoral behavior referenced in glowacks’ post. It’s also reasonable to take a harder line.
According to my theology, conflicting evidence should be decided in favor of Christian love. But that’s a minority view within the modern evangelical community, which to be clear I am not a part of.
This is a stupid argument even by political standards. By this “reasoning”, prosecuting someone for building code violations is unfair because it “vilifies” slumlords.
Alito provides us with a target-rich environment. Coming from a Supreme Court justice, that’s rather sadface. It’s also rare: I disagree with Scalia pretty much all the time, but at least he knows how to construct a cogent argument.
As does Alito. This component of his opinion (which to be fair is not the major portion, but more like a tangent) is strikingly lame.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Ultimately, it seems to me that most of the anti-SSM people aren’t as much butthurt about the idea that same-sex marriages are legal per-se, as much as they are butthurt about how they’re not able to dictate policy for the country, or their little pieces of it, and they’re conflating this reduction in political and social power and influence as an attack on their religion and religious beliefs, which none of this stuff is at all.
I mean, a rational Christian would say that it’s not their place to judge, and that SSM as legalized by the court is a strictly secular thing, so why get bent out of shape about it? Let the gay people get “married” by the judge or whatever; it certainly doesn’t count in the eyes of God as a “real” marriage by a duly designated pastor/priest/whatever.
Christians, it turns out, aren’t uniformly that big on “live and let live”.
“Live and let live?” Sounds Communist.
“Fake Christians” much prefer burning witches and declaring [del]jihad[/del] a crusade against something they are told they don’t like.
I’ll add a corollary to your theory – the mainstream majority had things pretty much its own way in the seventies and eighties and used that power to run roughshod over minorities of any kind. “Welfare queens” were sneered at, queers were beaten up and fired from their jobs and the “War on Drugs” was ratcheted up against the dirty smelly hippies who used them.
If that is acceptable behavior when you are in the majority then there will be a concurrent fear about becoming a minority. After all, those awful people will do the same things to them, won’t they?
I do think some are sincere. I have one Facebook friend who posted something about how she cried about the state of the nation, and I think she’s sincere, in that she’s worried about the morals of America. Her and some others are worried because they think that America is like in the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah or something like that.
Of course I strongly disagree, and I think even if God was going to smite the USA, there would be many, many reasons that would come before allowing gay marriage.
I don’t know what the sincere believers will do. If in the future when my Facebook friend meets a gay married couple if she’ll see that they’re just like a lot of straight married couples and change her views, or if she’ll pray for them and try to convince them of their sin.
I was reading a discussion about the reactions of members of various Christian denominations to this sort of “Oh, I just met a gay person and she’s not evil” moment. The people in the discussion seemed to feel that when the basis of the opposition (at least as conveyed to the church members) is “Gays are evil!” then meeting a gay person and learning they are not evil might be all it takes.
If the basis is a more complex theological argument, on the other hand, merely discovering gays don’t eat babies might not be enough.
Felix Salmon calls for taxation of bigoted churches:
http://fusion.net/story/158096/does-your-church-ban-gay-marriage-then-it-should-start-paying-taxes/
Wow, that was quick. And clearly unconstitutional. Churches are not public accomodations, but private clubs. They can discriminate against whoever they want.
But that doesn’t mean they deserve to be tax-exempt.
I like Felix Salmon, but his proposal isn’t going anywhere. He hails from Britain, which isn’t big on charitable deductions. Salmon opines that private schools and private Universities shouldn’t be tax deductible either.
I don’t know if his proposal is constitutional or not, but it’s not something that any politician would touch with a 10 foot pole.
Ok: I just skimmed these links:
http://www.felixsalmon.com/2012/08/when-private-school-tuition-is-tax-deductible/
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/07/08/universities-shouldnt-be-tax-exempt/
Example quote from Felix Salmon: [INDENT][INDENT] I’m no fan of the tax-deductibility of charitable donations in the first place — it’s an enormous tax expenditure which results in a relatively modest amount of extra charitable giving. (Ed Dolan has a good two-part overview of why the deduction is a bad idea.) But let’s put that debate to one side for the time being… [/INDENT][/INDENT]
Also: [INDENT][INDENT]. But if all colleges lost all their exemptions, and got their federal subsidy directly instead of indirectly — now that I would applaud. [/INDENT][/INDENT] These are political nonstarters. I predict that his tax the churches proposal will nonetheless remain a conservative bug-a-boo for years. They are gullible that way.
He’s right that tax exemption isn’t a right. Churches can be taxed. But tax policy can’t be used as a means to express disapproval of a person or organization’s morals. If you can tax churches for being prejudiced against gays, then you can tax individuals. Just pass a tax law that says everyone’s tax rate is 50% unless they affirm that they support gay marriage on their tax form. So everyone gets a tax exemption for being enlightened on gay marriage, but lose their tax exemption if they aren’t.
Churches shouldn’t be taxed because of their stance on gay marriage. Churches should be taxed because it’s the 21st century and a lot of people think it’s time. Period.
I’m so cool I was vilifying SSM opponents before the Court’s decision.
Fundamentally, the part I don’t get is this idea among the conservative, wingnut Christians that the laws of the land MUST mirror what their religion believes, or the nation is going to hell in a handbasket.