Der Trihs, you are yourself a bigot, failing to understand beyond your own myopic attempt at reasoning, that there are reasons beyond pure and utter hate that people take the positions they do against SSM. It is incumbent upon those of us determined to fight ignorance on the whole, (as opposed to your strident efforts to exchange one type of ignorance for another), to change the minds of those who oppose us with open, trusting and honest discourse. Failing that, we do nothing. Calling opponents names, pointing fingers and the commission of your erroenous yet various and sundry methods of browbeating do nothing but discredit you, your argument and the idea that your argument should be taken seriously no matter who proffers it.
SSM is not near or dear to me, I personally don’t care if it happens, though I wish the cause well, despite having you on its’ side. I suspect that your best efforts notwithstanding the folks who do care about it will make it so in the next 4 to 8 years in the majority of the country. Good for them. That kind of spirit and movement that inspires people is precisely what this country was built on.
You and your motivtions on the other hand are boot on the coattails, an albatross on the neck, weights in the pockets.
No. That’s not it at all. You can call someone a bigot if you know their specific reasons. But if you simply label a whole group of people as ‘bigots’ without any understanding of their individuality, then you are also a bigot, regardless if a subset of the individuals in question are bigoted or not.
So give me a valid reason to object to gay marriage. Remember to not be bigoted it has to show a clear threat. Religious objections and cultural aesthetics are by definition bigoted
Different kettle of fish. There’s solidly nonbigoted arguments for and against abortion. The main difference between the two camps is whether someone considers a fetus alive, and what rights they feel a person has over their body.
Would you please provide one of these elusive nonbigoted reasons to to oppose gay marriage? Keep in mind other countries have done it with no ill effects.
Fuck you Klan wanna be. Name one reason someone could object to Buddhism practice that isn’t religiously based. The one below doesn’t count unless you consider an objection to murder and objection to Christianity
Were people allowed to practice Buddhism without firecrackers?
If so than it’s a noise ordinance and not a Buddhist ban. Just like Christianity isn’t banned despite some old testament commands being nothing short of murder.
If it’s an actual ban against anyone practice Buddhism no matter how quietly they do it then yes it’s fucking bigoted and so was any troglodyte limp dicked syphilitic fool backwards enough to support it. Also if it’s in the US I’d like to see cite for the case and an explanation for why it doesn’t violate the First Amendment.
Well give me that objection to SSM that isn’t bigoted than. Put up or shut up as they say.
You’re not winning any intelligence points on this side either
[quote]
It’s just a religious law. A Jew who opposed castrated men working in wineries need not be a bigot. He may be all sorts of other things but he need not be bigoted against castrated men.[/quot]
Yes he would be a bigot. Forcing religion on someone else is bigoted.
Would you please elucidate me with an example of nobigoted objection to SSM?
You’re sounding like the kid telling about his phantom, body building, kung fu fighting older brother that’s gonna whip everyone’s ass, but no one ever sees him.
Bullshit. I used to know this lady who was half Japanese and half Mexican. High horse power sports car, told you exactly what she thought, liked to shoot guns, punk rock, and all that good stereotypical American stuff. Doesn’t have any problems visiting her family in Kyoto.
Kids are remarkably adaptable. They simply learn when in mom’s country do x, and when in dad’s country do y, or if raised in one country then they assimilate to that country. I mean there’s nothing wrong with not acting culturally American or Japanese is there?
Another fallacy of that argument is culture isn’t race. I mean I can go to Canada to visit my friend up there, and do all sorts innocent seeming things that mortify her in public because they’re rude up there. I made her turn beat red once. It was awesome.
Ban canadio-american marraige I guess.
This aside from Japanese racists apparently learning nothing from the Holocaust they inflicted in WW II. Why should the type of people responsible for the Bataan death march, and the Rape of Nanking be appeased at all instead of fought tooth and nail for the the horrors they’re bigoted racism inflicted on the world?
There’s evils greater then not complying with one’s social status. If a few mixed race kids who don’t always know their place can shake it up then good.
Didn’t say that about the present. In fact on reconsideration, in part thanks to your brilliant examples, I retract that concession.
It has everything to do with bigotry. You know what would help the poor of every race? Better educational opportunities. In fact the US has educational opportunities and universities generally try to have a diverse student body.
It doesn’t matter if your cousin is black and marries a white guy. You can go to college too with your blackself and marry whoever the hell you like.
Finally the bigots who expose this are fucking stupid too and fail at math. It doesn’t matter what race your kids are because they don’t affect the poverty level of other people. By appeasing bigoted KKK degenerates and banning interracial marriage all you’ve done is make the percentages change.
Say you have 10 purple people in poverty. Two goes off to college and marries a green people. Well you still have 8 purple people in poverty. So you have 80% of purple people in poverty.
Now those two purple people got married and had a kid named nurple instead. Well now that changes the percentages so that only 72% of purple people are in poverty but you still have 8 purple people in poverty. The percentage changed but you still have 8 bleedin people in poverty.
In short my mixed race self finds the math on this complete fail, and the bigots who expose it to be bleedin stupid as well.
Also mixed race doesn’t equal white. I do computer service for a very successful black and white couple. As hard as it is to believe white people can culturally assimilate to “black” culture. As the white guy did. Their kids are also raised “black”. Quite frankly it’s up to the kid which culture they want to assimilate to anyway. They’ll find peers and join in. I know a white chick same thing. Not black at all but you wouldn’t know it talking to her on the phone.
Again equating culture to race is a fallacy. Culture is learned, race is ancestor based.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying it’s unfair to label all opponents of SSM as bigoted, because one or more of them may have a reason for their opposition that isn’t based on bigotry. Right?
I’m a non-religious, non-spiritual person who just got married last year, and you want to tell me that I shouldn’t be able to call myself married?
I don’t claim to know whether or not you’re a bigot but you’re definitely a nosy asshole with delusions of grandeur if you think you can tell me what to call my marriage. Stay out of my business.
Der Trihs has a number of problems, but magellan (despite repeated opportunity) has never given me reason to doubt that he is a bigot. In fact, several statements of his suggest a determined ignorance with no desire to explore it and every desire to explain it away. He’s been given ample opportunity to give his reasoning but I’ve never seen anything I’d consider more than a fig-leaf rationalization.
In recent weeks, also, the discussions have become increasingly acrimonious with magellan displaying a rather troll-ish glee at the anger he inspires.
Perhaps he’s neither a bigot nor a troll. He just acts that way. Gentle soul that I am, I’m willing to hold out a little bit longer in hopes of the dramatic moment when magellan, finally, gives a logical reason to oppose gay marriage.
I think most of us regard marriage as a right, not a privilege. I think if most of the people opposed to SSM were told by the state that they could not marry the person of their choice, they would feel pretty violated. They would demand a compelling explanation why they could not wed the person they loved. If that were not forthcoming, if it was as lame as semantics, they would feel like their rights were violated.
The supreme court agrees. From Loving v Virginia:
“Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”
@ Elucidator
Sure denying SSM is not as bad as lynching. Of course there are degrees of bigotry. A person who denies a Jew a promotion they would have received but for their background is not as bad as a death camp guard. They’re still a bigot.
ETA: I realize Der Trihs is a controversial poster and a lot of people have a visceral dislike of him. But I would hope most people could pay attention to the substance of the post rather than the identity of the poster.
I just posed this question to my email buddy for the third time. “What, specifically, makes you feel you have to define SS couples differently than het couples, with regard to marriage?”
First and foremost all unions are technically civil first as well as religious. I was married in the catholic church, (despite not being catholic) I however do not recognize the place the church claims in my marriage. If I divorce my wife, it is the county I have to deal with, not the church. Other than for my own interest or reasons, I never have to step into a RCC again, however I MUST stop in a gov’t building if there are certian things I need done, this includes marriage.
If I never went to a church, at least here in Illinois, I could still be ‘married’ but that’s a sematic point if ever there was one. No church = civil union. The county/state etc cannot, per-se ‘marry’ even though it’s called that, it is a union recognized by the AHJ, not marriage in the truest definition. Conversely, the church cannot entertain a ‘marriage’ without a license from the AHJ because it is not binding. The fact that these things are intertwined is the true source of the problem.
Now, despite my previous post in this thread, I suppose that by the dictionary definition, those who oppose SSM would be “bigoted”. I do not believe however that this makes them all-around bigots any more than instaling an outlet makes one an electrician. I believe you can hold viewpoints based on your honest opinion that seem bigoted to others and still be a decent and good person. I believe this because I’ve seen it in my life first hand and because as people, we are not measured on a single point but on our lives as a whole. What Der Trihs does is say you’re anti-SSM, therefore you are a bigot. In fairness, I did the same thing, but that’s illustrative of the point I’m making; people have ideas, ideas do not have people. I can believe that SSM is wrong and I can still be a good person and do good in this world. A fact that I think Der Trihs has missed, or is ignoring. In fact, on review I retract my statement that Der Trihs is a bigot, instead, he is acting in a bigoted way, and should stop it.
The fact is that by having such staunch and vehement arguments against those who believe differently than he, Der Trihs actually hurts the cause he champions, pushing those on the fence one way or the other. If the aim is to enact SSM and gain wide acceptance, then you have to appeal to a wide audience. The militant SSM crowd, indeed, the militant gay crowd is doing as much harm as they are good. If you just want to be accepted for who you are, that’s fine, but if who you are is a dude that wears assless leather chaps, platform heels and nipple clamps at noon on tuesday on your walk past the middle school, it’s gonna take people a while and you can’t just wander up to 'em and scream at them how they need to accept you. It will not work.
For the very religious or very conservative, SSM (and the publicized argument therefore) is the equivalent to the assless chaps guy. People need to accept that and adjust their arguments, their PUBLIC arguments, to their actual audience, not the conservative or middle of the road straight people. The fist pounders, the screamers, the banner wavers are doing these things to inspire their own side, they aren’t changing minds on the other.
Based on your description, if Grandma Fuddyduddy’s doctor told her that she needed to take a vitamin pill every week in order to arrest a condition that would otherwise kill her in six months, Grandma Fuddyduddy would refuse to do so because it is different from what she did before. In other words, you are describing someone who is simply not mentally competent to manage her own affairs, or to have opinions driven by comprehensible motivations. You might just as well invoke the hypothetical opinions of hypothetical Grandma Fuddyduddy’s hypothetical Persian cat for your example.
On the contrary, it’s happened quite often, the reasons just aren’t sufficient for the group who dismisses them out of hand, despite them being true for their believers, some of which are:
[ul]
[li]It is against the teachings of the church / bible :rolleyes:[/li][li]It is the next step to inter-species marriage (a particulary specious argument)[/li][li]It will cause incredible economic impact to businesses (somewhat true)[/li][/ul]
I don’t believe any of these, and the only one that implies direct bigotry is #2. 1 and 3 are motivated by what could be considered bigotry, however even if #3 was debunked by study, that is not real-world, only a potential model of what might happen, so it’s a case of not knowing what we don’t know, but you don’t necessarily have to be a bigot to believe it.
Nonsense. In the case before the thread, membership in the relevant “group of people” is defined by a specific bigoted viewpoint. Your position is equivalent to arguing that one cannot assume that someone is anti-black simply because he happens to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
‘Bigot’ is insufficient as a descriptor. It tells us nothing about the person other than they hold some vague irrational prejudice. Those people might actually be bigots, but bigotry explains nothing.
You happen to be a bigot as it regards religious beliefs so you reduce any religious rationale to mere bigotry, but I don’t say you think the way you do because you are a bigot. Being a bigot isn’t the sum total of who you are even though you are without a doubt a massive bigot.
I think it’s becoming increasingly obvious it’s not about these rights. California, for example, with it’s domestic partnerships, provides for all of these, and has for quite some time. Yet, despite that, only about 50,000 couples (including elderly hetero couples) have bothered with it over nearly 10 years of existance. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20081013/news_1n13partners.html
Yet, when marriage was briefly legal over a course of about 6 months, almost 20,000 couples got married. Why the difference? If it was about rights, why haven’t more people made use of the domestic partnerships?
Can’t it be “secondary bigotry”? You’ve adopted the bigoted stance of an established group (i.e., the church) for no other reason than because you’re a member of their group. In other words, you can’t be a “good believer” if you don’t marginalize the way they marginalize.