Since I can't be honest in GD . . .

The BBQ Pit
161

I hate to break it to you, but I don’t give a good goddamn about you or your marriage. I wouldn’t know you if I ran over you, and I don’t care if what you call “marriage” is actually an every-other-Tuesday orgy and the entity to which you are married is a carved wooden drug store Indian, or if you were married in a Catholic cathedral by the Pope himself with God’s own angels in attendance. So if you think for one minute I give a shit about your “business,” nevermind want to intrude into it, then you’re the one with delusions of gradeur.

My position is that government-endorsed unions should be called one thing and religious or spiritual unions should be called something else. This is not a novel position, nor one held only by me. There is no reason for, no excuse for denying equal rights under the civil law to gay people, and that obviously includes the rights and responsibilities of a marital union. But conflating the “moral” and religious issue of “marriage” with the civil and legal issue of “marriage” muddies the waters and gives the religious right the base they are using to object to equal extension of the marital franchise. If we were scrupulous in differentiating between what is required or owed by the civil law and the government, from what is allowed or permitted by whatever the hell church or spiritual group, we would remove that weapon from their arsenal.

I have no right to say whether you are or are not married. But in my opinion, neither does the government, because it’s none of their business. That doesn’t mean I run around informing anyone they are not married. The term “marriage” is currently used to describe both civil and spiritual unions. I think it should be limited to one or the other – and I honestly don’t care which, so long as we come up with a good term for whatever is the other state. So I may in fact be an asshole, but this isn’t why.

162

This is a pretty thoughtful and objective post and it gives a lot of food for thought to the conversation. I have nothing else to add right now but I want you to know it’s appreciated even if I’m part of the hostile audience.

163

Garbage. All of those would still qualify you as a bigot if you tried to deny, say, black people or Jews marriage using those reasons - as long as it’s not a same sex marriage you are denying. You are simply trying to claim that SSM is a special case, where what would be called bigotry if applied to racial or ethnic groups suddenly isn’t bigotry when applied to homosexuals.

164

The argument claims that in the latter case, the existence of “nurple” would somehow make it more likely that the 8 poor purple people would be inspired to improve their lot. Even if one supposes that this is so, the notion that the two successful purple people should have a government-enforceable obligation to provide this example is outrageous Big Brotherism.

Similarly, even if it could be demonstrated that the presence of married gay couples had any of the alleged sociological effects on the straight population, such a finding would simply not be a legitimate basis for state policy, and invocations thereof to advocate such policy would remain nothing more than a fig leaf rationalization for bigotry.

165

It’s a libertarian thing. Wanting to remove the government involvement in the social sphere. You are putting the cart before the horse. The reason people didn’t want to remove government involvement from marriage before the issue came up is because nobody thought about it, or if they did it was a minority opinion that was just something you talked about over cocktails or while passing the joint, not something that got much press. I for one always opposed government involvement in marriage but before this became a hot-button topic on the issue I was just some iconoclastic late teens-early twenty-something and people just patted me on the head and said I held my opinions just to get a rise out of people. Which is probably partially true, though now that my thoughts are more well formulated I do see a certain wisdom in removing the government from marriage. I would like to get the government out of social issues wherever possible.

166

No, it’s not. People are not opposed to SSM on a single specific viewpoint.

167

that was his entire point you fucking moron!

168

I think that you can make a similar argument without using the no-true-Scotsman fallacy. Clearly, there are people in the world who discriminate and kill in the name of religion. However, there clearly also are people who do wonderful things in the name of religion…feed the hungry, house the homeless, etc. Even within the same religion there are some who do one and some who do the other. Further, there’s no real evidence that if there were no such thing as religion, all of those same human opinions and behaviors wouldn’t still occur, with some other ideology to blame them on. So a person who believes that relgion is inherently evil or that all religious people are evil by nature is a bigot, since it’s demonstrable that this isn’t true.

169

Because they are not and never will be the equal of marriage; not in rights, not in recognition, not in respect. That’s what they are for; a ghetto. A slap in the face, and an attempt to write bigotry into law.

170

A couple reasons that come to mind.

When was the last time “separate but equal” was tried in America? How’d that work out?

Even something as simple as a drinking fountain. Water is water but civil rights advocates fought for everyone be able to drink from the same fountain. How would you feel about being told repeatedly “this marriage/drinking fountain isn’t for you” simply because of your race/sexual preference? Would you be a good boy and drink from the other or would you fight for your rights to be treated the same as anyone?

171

You do understand why this is a morally vacant argument right? Because there are no historical examples of widespread homosexual marriage that are pertinent to our situation.

I happen to think yeah, it’s ridiculous to think homosexual marriage will hurt straight marriage, but I also understand the overall theme that is the eroding of the Christian culture in this nation, which is a real and actual thing that is occurring. You constantly cheer it on so I hope you won’t be so base as to deny that it’s something that’s occurring.

To those that value Christian culture watching it be wiped away in mainstream society does appear as harm. Their culture is being destroyed by forces way beyond their control. Gay marriage is merely one symptom and aspect of what is doing it, but the decoupling of sex and procreation is what most disturbs conservatives IME. This is a natural trend toward a transhuman society, which is a horrific notion to cultural conservatives. The arguments put forth on this message board regarding the nature of gender are the very foundation of transhumanism. When the outward characteristics of a person are insufficient to determine their identity as a human, then the definition of what it is to be becomes a lot more malleable. That’s frightening to cultural conservatives. That fright, I perfectly understand and have sympathy for.

It all goes a lot deeper than, “They are bigots”, allows for. It’s not that people who oppose SSM aren’t bigots, likely most if not all are. It’s just that, “They are bigots tells us nothing about their motivations.”, it’s the answer of someone who is intellectually incurious.

172

Both #1 and #3 imply bigotry, because both #1 and #3 rely upon selective citation to support a predetermined bigoted conclusion (i.e. teh ikky gays don’t get to have the same rights as me).

I’ll assume from the “:rolleyes:” that I need not go into detail on #1. As for #3, the “incredible economic impact” of gay marriage is no more and no less that from marriages involving people whose maternal grandfather’s last name includes thus-and-such a string of letters (chosen so that the number of people affected turns out to be the same). Thus, to insist upon an exclusion for the former and not for the latter cannot be explained on non-bigoted green-eyeshade grounds.

173

I can’t think of anyone who has ever been hurt by Gay marriage, but atheism, I can easily point to millions dead in the cause of an atheist agenda.

174

Hang on a second, it’s going to take me a while to find the goalpost again. So instead of finding an example of Christians killing in the name of religion in the last 1000 years, I have to find an example in the last 10 years.

Yeah right. :rolleyes: And the civil war was about “States’ rights.” So let me see if I have all the parameters down. You want an example of killing in the name of Christianity (not some other religion, or religion in general). It has to be in the last 10 years or so. The killer must declare in a sworn affidavit that he is killing in the name of Christianity, and there is no other conceivable or related reason why he might be doing the killing. Perhaps you would also like to limit it to victims named Steve, or acts committed on Tuesday, but only if it was Tuesday to the east of the international date line? By all means, keep narrowing it down until you win. Congratulations!

175

That point is true enough, and causes what little sympathy I have for cultural conservatives to evaporate like a snowball on the surface of Rigel. If opposition to transhumanism delays the defeat of aging by so much as a decade, simple arithmetic shows that the opponents will have enough blood on their hands to make Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin look like a couple of naughty boys who should be slapped soundly upon the wrist and sent to bed without dessert.

176

Of course not. But you already knew that, didn’t you? Just as you knew that “dismissed” was insulting, misleading, and dishonest.

177

Unless the economic reasons are why you believe it bad, then what? There’s no established group to blame there (unless there’s a group of economists out there railing against SSM). It can be ancillary, augmented or even inherited bigotry if you like, but that one belief does not that person a bigot make.

178

But we have millions of people married right now, and no rational reason to think that single sex marriages are any different than them. And wild eyed speculation about vague disasters is not a valid reason to deny people their rights.

If they define Christianity according to bigotry, then their version of Christianity is something well lost. I’m not going to cry for the World Church of the Creator, either. And as a wild guess, I suspect the gay Christians who want to marry have a different viewpoint on what qualifies as Christian culture.

Why do the bigots alone get to define “Christian culture” ?

I rather doubt most of them know what transhumanism is, much less care. Nor does it have any rational connection to same sex marriage. Rather the opposite; marriage is a very human thing.

Their motivations are irrelevant. By holding the position they do, they demonstrate the worthlessness of those motivations. I don’t really care why a particular person is racist or sexist either.

179

I’d agree. And I’d say that it’s a civil right. But it’s possible for others to view marriage as a religious institution that the government simply happens to sanction and which is between a man and a woman, and have no logical contradiction to not feeling the same way about non-religiously sanctioned unions.

Sure, they’d be upset if their view of marriage was challenged. But that’s hardly surprising. In their view, “marriage” means “what the Church does and the government recognizes”, it can be a dozen different flavors of wrong, and it can be bigoted, but it is not, by necessity a bigoted position.

Wrong. I’m drawing the 100% valid (and indeed, necessary and true) distinction between someone who holds a position that results in discrimination because they are bigoted against those who are discriminated against, and those who hold a position that results in discrimination for reasons that have nothing to do with bigotry and/or when that person is, in fact, not a bigot.

An inability to deal with nuance is not the sign of accurate perception.

Ex-fucking-actly.
A bigot is for oppressing a group of people and/or hates a group of people for non-objective reasons. If someone can be convinced to change their mind if they can be shown that their gloss was inaccurate and they were supporting oppressive policies, then they aren’t a bigot.
Do you think that explaining to them the logical necessity of marriage as a civil right is more effective than screaming at them that they secretly hate gay people?

Some people are adverse to societal change. Call them extreme conservatives, call them reactionaries, whatever.

Come on now. Let’s not head down the “conservatism is a mental disorder” path.

Of course, because someone whose opinion of what’s good for the community is different than yours and who values stability over even well intentioned change is obviously a mental invalid unable to care for themselves.

Now all we need is Ann Coulter to come in to this thread and we can fling all sorts of slurs at people on both sides of the political spectrum.

Good luck trying to make reactionary political philosophy part of the DMV IV.

180

Quite the contrary, we don’t truly know the economic impact of SSM, franky, one can use data to bolster either side of #3. I don’t know if it’s a solid argument or not, but it implies if nothing else, fiscal conservatism but not necessarily bigotry, though bigotry COULD be used as a motivator.