You don’t “advance tolerance and reason” with bigots. You fight for your legal rights, and wait for them to die off.
You don’t, this much is clear.
Cite for this please? Is it from the mission statement of the World Atheist Council or something?
Listen, the Catholics and the Mormons are way out front in the category of “Reproducing Self.” We’re gonna die off way before they do, so I see a flaw in your stategy.
I would argue that some people are overt bigots, some have bigoted tendencies, while others are bigots in denial.
Since neither bigotry nor religious denomination is genetically hardwired, not that important.
When the arguments have been dismantled and all is said and done, and the opponents to SSM keep pulling “buts” out of their butts, I cannot come to any other conclusion than that they are bigots on this issue. Clinging to invalid, stupid, absurd arguments is a classic sign of bigotry. When someone won’t let go of an idea, regardless of its validity, they are choosing hate and marginalization over equality. What word would you choose to describe this person? We’re not talking about which Ben & Jerry’s flavor is better here. We’re talking about the basic idea that All Men Are Created Equal. As someone upthread said, how do you feel about Black Restrooms and White Restrooms? This isn’t any different. If we are who we say we are, we’d put on our Big Girl Panties and afford SS couples the opportunity to marry.
Big Girl? You missing any undies? I may have a clue about that…
Maybe it has something to do with being on the business end of it, but I can’t get a knife blade between homophobia and bigotry against gay people. Homophobia is a form of bigotry and hatred, no matter how pleasant a mask it wears, or how amenable it might be to be changed. Someone unable to deal with the fact their beliefs make them bigoted and hateful should look into changing those beliefs.
Until and unless someone stops being a homophobic bigot, they remain a homophobic bigot. Once they stop, they stop.
As I’ve said many times in the past, there is no loving way to say “you aren’t an equal human being to me.”
Once again you’re conflating comprehension with tactics. Just because I’ve correctly identified someone as having a homophobic belief doesn’t mean I’m going to punch them in the nose. As I said, the appropriate tactics vary from person to person. I’m not going to scream anything at or otherwise act hostile towards Granny Fuddy-duddy if I’m talking to her, because that’s not going to help. But I’m not going to give her a pass or pretend she doesn’t approve of my oppression, either.
I’m glad you’ve come around to this. You said before that marriage was a religious union. Which was what wevets, and I, disagreed with. You are now saying that it is all the same to you to retain marriage as a legal union (which it was far before it was a religious one) and cut religious marriage loose. That’s just fine. That’s what they do in France, as a matter of fact – churches cannot solemnize legal marriages, only the state can do that, and the state doesn’t care what people do at church after they do their thing at city hall. Applause on coming around.
I didn’t say “humanity”.
I’m pretty sure Catholics and Mormons mostly create more Catholics and Mormons, regardless of genetic hardwiring. Your blythe dismissal of the importance of that fact seems a little shortsighted.
Before the 50s, Quebec was one of the most ardently Catholic societies on the planet; social services were provided by the Church, everyone had huge families, birth control and women’s rights were next to unthinkable, etc.
Then we had the Quiet Revolution. It’s now one of the most secular societies on the planet; it was the first super-municipal jurisdiction in the world to ban discrimination against queer people, has one of the highest approval ratings for same-sex marriage in the world, and otherwise is at the forefront of plenty of issues that would have been all but unimaginable in the hyper-Catholic atmosphere that prevailed during and before the Grande Noirceur.
Most people are still theoretically Catholic, you understand, although God knows if they’ve seen the inside of a church since they were baptized, if they were. But if people’s opinions were obligatorily determined by their heritage, nothing would ever have changed to date, and we’d still be thinking the Sun went around the Earth.
First, there’s nothing I can do about it. Second, the Catholics are changing over time; I see no reason to think that they will have the same opinions 50 years from now any more than they have the ones they had 50 years in the past. Regardless of what the Pope would like. Third, I don’t know enough about the general direction of Mormonism to make a prediction, but they aren’t the Catholic Church in terms of size, power and prestige anyway.
Except I never said anything about “cutting religious marraige loose,” whatever that means. You’re not required to undergo a religious marriage now, so I’m not sure how much looser that can get as a requirement, since it is not, in fact, a requirement at all. And I certainly never said that people should not be able to get legally married in a church if they so choose and if the church would allow. I wouldn’t make everyone go down to city hall to get hitched, but I would make everyone who wanted their union to be governmentally recognized register that union at city hall, with that registration being the operative event for governmental recognition. In my hypothetical universe, you are civilly married when you meet the government’s minimum guidelines for ability to marry (age, single status) and you notify the government formally that you are, in fact, married. I wouldn’t care where you got married; I wouldn’t even care if you never got formally ceremonially married at all.
But yes, I certainly do see the value in in clearly distinguishing between civil unions and religious unions and no, I don’t care at all what terminology is used. I haven’t “come around” to that position; it’s the position I’ve always held. AFAICT, your objection and wevet’s to what I originally said is one regarding terminology – “marriage v. civil unions”, or “civil marriage v. religious marriage.” That was never the thrust of the point I was making anyway.
Good thing I never said people’s opinions were obiligatorily determined by their heritage then.
At heart, I’m really against people abusing the definition of already defined words and twisting them into some other meaning to suit their own individual purpose. Even more, I’m against other people picking up on those changes and thinking that those words were correctly defined in the first place. One could say that I’m against the spread of ignorance.
I’ve always thought of marriage as between a man and a woman. Often I would hear priests on tv claim exactly such, and reinforced from my own experience with catholic weddings that I have attended.
When I met my first gay couple, when I was still in grade school, I really did wonder if they could get “married.” I don’t have a problem with it, and I now have friends who are gay couples. I want them to have all the bells and whistles that come with being married…but, I don’t want to call it marriage.
In fact, I’ll go one further: the more I went to school, and the more I learned about the world, and the more I’ve come to define my beliefs about the world, the more I don’t want government defining what a marriage is.
Marriage has been, originally, a province of religion, and I think it should stay that way. While I abhor changes to definitions, if it must be done, it should be done so in the most fair and equitable way possible. Therefore, a marriage should be a union, recognized by a religion, and NOT sponsored/ratified by the state. Those arrangements/unions recognized by the state, should be all called civil unions, because that is the more accurate term. I have a huge problem if the state does not allow marriage between natural persons, regardless of creed, race, nationality, religion, or color.
Now, if this makes me a bigot, then that term has lost all meaning.
First, you’re right, there’s nothing you can do about it, because you personally would be incapable of engaging a person of faith in a way that was not contemptuous and hostile. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done, though.
Second, everyone is changing over time, but it seems the faintest of hopes to believe the the RCC, of all organizations, is evolving at any sort of clip. And even if they change their opininons, that doesn’t mean they will change in your favor. There is little indication that the RCC globally is becoming more tolerant of homosexuality, much less gay marriage.
Not sure of the relevance of this. You might take a look at the role of the LDS is passing Prop 8 before again dismissing them as lacking in size, power, and prestige.
One could, but they’d be wrong. Evolution of language != ignorance.
Atheism doesn’t have “tenets”, dear, much less core ones.
Even if it did, “the destruction of religion” wouldn’t be one of them. We don’t give a shit what you believe in.
Here’s the problem, though…have the government call it a civil union, and have “marriage” be the sole province of religion. The term marriage is still going to lose the meaning you are granting to it because there will be (and already are) religions who will grant marriage to same-sex couples. So, the state might not call it “marriage,” and likewise they wouldn’t call what my husband and I have “marriage,” because the fact that we had vows in a church would be meaningless within that context. But all our friends and family consider us married, and likewise, we all consider some relatives married who are lesbian and also had vows in a church. If that couple stood in the same church as a hetero couple, and said the same vows as a hetero couple, how can you then legitimately refer to one as a “marriage” and one not?