It’s funny how you single me out for special treatment. You caught me three times with improper cites. Once was a typo making you stupid for harping on it. The second I dropped because I knew I was citing dubious sources and didn’t want to hijack related to the dubious source, and the third time I immediately conceded you were correct.
How intellectually dishonest of me to retract when someone calls me on an aspect of my argument! What a lying cad I am!
Or you just have a crush.
pwn noob.
I’ve noticed that when someone has a visceral dislike for someone they assume that every time they are wrong they are lying. But hey, at least you have such a respect for my intellect that you’d believe I’m lying before you’d believe I am just wrong. lol.
Conspicuously absent from mswas’s short list of people who aren’t really all that dumb, I find myself growing dumber the longer I continue to read this thread.
You haven’t “retracted” squat. Even when you admit, as you just have, that you have no basis for the belief, you still (as in - this week) post the same syncretist “One God Underneath It All” spew that led me to call you on your facts in the first place. So no, there is no intellectual honesty there.
You know as well as I do that while many of the founders were Christians, many others did not believe in a personal God. Deism and rationalism were a big fads back then, all the cool kids were doing it.
Oh I see, so really this is just a sense of entitlement. You get to call me on some tangental point and I am supposed to just dump everything I believe. I believe in God, I believe there is only one God, I don’t believe in many Gods, I believe in many interpretations. Deal with it.
Got it.
You’re a fucking idiot. It’s fun to watch you scrape and scratch trying to get the high ground on this, but you just keep pushing and pushing your incredibly trivial point.
No - but your excision of the winking smiley after the section you quoted shows you probably already knew that.
Serious analogy FAIL.
Think about what happens when you cut a boat in two.
Yes, even catamarans.
See, this is the seriously fucked up part of your logic. Religions can already do this.
Let’s say that again and be more specific:
**The Roman Catholic Church can already declare that “Sacremental Marriage” is only between a man and a woman, and enforce that upon their clergy and their records.
Protestant Pentecostals can already declare that “Holy Matrimony” only exists between a man and a woman, and enforce that upon their clergy and their records.**
The fact that religious opponents of same-sex marriage have not limited their objections to that course of action demonstrates that they’re not interested in just the term.
You are being naive if you think that will solve the problem. The religious people objecting to SSM can already create their own term. That’s not what they want. They want none of that icky stuff about non-heterosexual orientations in public.
I know 427 pages of this thread have passed since I last visited it, and perhaps you’ve already admitted error in suggesting religious people should control the term marriage. That’s fine.
No, but you are not “entitled” to push your belief as though justified by facts, which is what you still do. Because you and fact have a tangential relationship, at best.
I also remember problems in Detroit, California, and the Mid-West. Do you really think that racism was only in the South? Did you think that schools in other parts of the country were naturally integrated?
But integration was supported by a majority of the country. Jim Crow was opposed by a majority of the country.
There were plenty of people who were unhappy about it. But how did the Civil Rights bills get passed if most people were opposed to them? Did politicians who voted for civil rights do so even though their constituency hated the idea? No, the ones whose constituency was against civil rights voted against civil rights.
The country as a whole decided for integration. There were still plenty of people who were violently opposed to integration, that doesn’t mean those people were a majority.
Anyway, this is a quibble. Kalhoun was saying that the majority of people in the US today aren’t in favor of same-sex marriage, but since same-sex marriage was a civil right we should just force them to accept it. My point is, how do you actually accomplish this? You can’t do it via legislation, since you’re outvoted. You can try to do it via the courts, but the courts have to agree with you. If the courts don’t agree with you, you can’t force the courts to agree with you.
So how exactly would you go about forcing the country to accept gay marriage when most people don’t want to? You do it by convincing them to accept it.
Wiki says that the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order that public opinion was against. I’m no Civil War scholar, but this seems to be an important exception to the idea that we need to convince either the people or the legislature to do the right thing. We can just fucking do it.
The fact that we’re a democratic republic rather than a straight up democracy means that some things are a test of political will rather than just a simple majority vote.
If the people can outlaw SSM with a pull of the ballot box for this single issue alone they will do so. But a large majority of America might not be against it enough to try to recall judges/pass supermajority amendments/replace legislators who they agree with on other issues.
So if judges and legislators disagree with the people and their consituents on this issue, but the opponents of SSM aren’t active enough to make it count, that is one forseeable way in which it could become legal if the majority would prefer it to not be legal.
Is President Obama part of we? Right now he isn’t. He’s on the other side. And why? Because the majority of the American public is on the other side. I’m morally certain that if the majority of the American public were in favor of same-sex marriage Obama would sign the legislation with a smile.
So the way to get the President to force same-sex marriage on the American public is to convince the American public to support same-sex marriage.
AAGREE!
That is the problem with people who think they can push their beliefs, opinions, or religion. They get the idea that everyone must believe the same thing, and barring that, everyone must obey. They think they can MAKE you obey.
Because THEIR version of God supposedly said so, as interpreted or extrapolated by them, or (sometimes) by someone else (a preacher, a TV “preacher”, a professional rabble rouser etc). Or they just don’t like how you live, and decide they have the right to dictate to you.
People, I’ve said it before. Believe in whatever god or demon you want. Go to whatever church you want. Just don’t try that “The Dread Dormammu commands” crap on the rest of us.
We don’t have to kowtow to your personal religion at all.
And in any case, the President can’t enact national same-sex marriage by the stroke of a pen. Sure, he can issue executive orders, which are orders to the agents of the federal executive branch. But those executive orders aren’t binding on state governments, or the federal judiciary, or the legislative branch. And they can’t violate laws enacted by the legislature. And an executive order requiring recognition of gay marriage would violate DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act - Wikipedia).
Note that Obama could change policy in the military such as Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell by executive order, since he’s commander in chief of the military, and he hasn’t done anything about it in the 6 months he’s been president.