Precisely.
Carlos Slim has 73 billion dollars. Where the fuck is my god damned 73 billion dollars!??! It’s my godamned BASIC HUMAN RIGHT to have 73 fucking billion dollars! You* fuckers!
*General you.
“Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…” - Chief Justice Earl Warren, Loving v. Viriginia, 1967, in a unanimous opinion.
Har har har. And the right to freedom means we should throw the jails open, right?
You could replace “Republicans” with “Hillary Clinton supporters” and that sentence would be spot on.
Having babies is also a basic human right and you need someone else’s help with that, too.
Hell, you could argue that speech requires someone to speak and someone to hear. Petition requires someone to ask and someone to be asked. Assembly requires more than one person.
And Miller already quoted (one of the) the relevant quotes in the American context.
It just gets better and better.
I think I know what’s going on. The Republicans cheated a gypsy a while back and she put a curse on them. Now, calling someone “a rising star of the Republican Party” means they shall be cursed with an epic fail in short order.
I hadn’t heard of this guy before, but I think that he (and other smart, successful, accomplished religious fundie-types) should stand as a humbling example to all us enlightened liberals.
Being ‘smart,’ logical, or educated does not inoculate one against wrong conclusions and beliefs.
Instead of asking, “how can this smart guy believe something so obviously wrong,” we should be asking, “how many of my beliefs are based on my personal feelings about an issue, which I then convince myself must be factually true because of how much smarter and logical I am than the people who believe otherwise?”
It might help us understand each other a bit more, and is certainly a more productive pathway than to just sit and stare agape at people who believe differently than us, wondering how they could possibly be so dumb.
Actually, being treated equally means you have just as much chance of having your idiocy pointed and laughed at as anyone else.
Actually, Dr. Carson is being logically consistent. As he said IF you define “marriage” as a union between a man and a woman, any other unions (woman-woman, man-man, man-?, etc.) are something else. If you define marriage as any union between any two parties, then “gay” marriage is marriage.
I don’t see all the fuss-maybe the logic is too simple?
Most certainly not an idiot in the field of neurology but in other areas, political ideology or religious zealotry has compelled him to ignore science. He is just another in a long line of distinguished scientists - Pauling, Hoyle, Shockley - who have taking a curious path, although that did so much earlier than the others is a bit distressing.
I actually used to have a problem with gay marriage. Because, I figured, if some group (let’s say, Christianity) wants to have their stupid club for jerks, then they should be able to have that. No one else should force their way in.
But, after I had my ignorance on the topic fought, I understood that marriage isn’t a religious thing, it’s a legal thing, with all kinds of rights and obligations that are important to some people. Every consenting adult has an equal right to those perks, if any of us has a right. So, if Dr. Carson defines marriage as ‘between a man and a woman’ then the entire point of contention is that it is unfair not to broaden that definition to include man/man and woman/woman.
He understands that. It’s not as if he is claiming to only want to use the **word **‘marriage’ in its original context. No, he is actually trying to keep the institution limited to the original definition, and in trying to defend that, he decided to use the kind of distasteful examples that he knew would put a bad taste in his audience’s mouths (Nambla, bestiality).
I know many Christians who have their shit together, so I don’t really blame Christianity for his idiotic statements. Rather, I think he is using his Christianity as an excuse for his willful ignorance.
Like other posters have pointed out, the man has really said some dumb shit that any thinking man can see is dumb. Not only the marriage stuff, but stuff like evolution, too.
Maybe the skilled surgeon is actually an idiot savant.
I do wish that people like him would at least come out and be honest and say what they really believe, which is: “I think gay people are evil and sinners, and I don’t want them to be happy like we are”, rather than talking about the sanctity of marriage and such bullshit.
Of course, the sad thing is that if they did say that there would be a goodly bunch of morons clutching their precious bibles right behind them.
Religions need to come up with their own word. Marriage is a secular term. Regardless of the genders of the spouses, we understand that a married couple are mated, not that they are following a particular religious doctrine. If a couple wants to say they are bound according to the covenants of their particular religion, they need a different term to signify that–like Holy Wedlocked.
People who say that gays want to redefine marriage are wrong. The word “marriage” doesn’t mean only man and woman any more than “sandwich” means only bread and ham. We understand that marriage is the concept of two people bonding for life.
Maybe all you need to be a neurosurgeon is the ability to memorize and recall. Have a delicate touch and just remember a bunch of “if this, do that”. So maybe he has very little ability for deductive reasoning and to think for himself. He is against gay marriage because he was told it was wrong, not that he came to that conclusion himself.
I think it would be most accurate to say that marriage is a societal thing. Whether it is, additionally, a religious term, or a legal term, or both, or neither, depends on the society.
This is why he has apologized, but the thing is how many examples of people with non-typical sexual preferences who could possibly want to expand the definition of marriage can you name? I can think of polygamists, bestialists, pedophiles, and homosexuals. If there are other groups I would have no idea what they are called. So his examples are necessarily restricted to groups that some would call deviants.
I want to “expand the definition of marriage” to cover same sex marriage. I’m a heterosexual woman married to a man.
Why does he have to use “non-typical sexual preferences” at all when talking about people who want to expand the definition of marriage?
I went to nursing school at Hopkins, and you would really have to be there to understand how he’s viewed. The man is revered. Spoken of in hushed tones, the whole deal. Add that to the fact that neurosurgeons tend to have colossal egos anyway, and I can see how it’s never occurred to him that he needs to apply critical thinking to any of his beliefs. I mean, he’s Ben Carson, for god’s sake.
And on a personal note…I was walking out of the hospital via the underground parking exit after a late night clinical rotation. And there he was, standing by the guard desk, in his scrubs, all alone. Just…standing there. It was a little like just running across, I don’t know…the president, maybe? Being a bit star struck, I told him that I admired his work (and I do…the man really is amazingly brilliant…his work separating cranially joined conjoined twins is justly world famous). And he…spoke to me. For about 10 minutes he asked me, a nursing student, literally a no one, questions about my career aspirations. He was nice, approachable, and acted like he had respect for me. It’s obviously something I’ve never forgotten. To hear that he has these kind of hurtful views is really quite disappointing.
Yes, he was. You are just making a surface reading. The point of bringing them up is to try to equate them in the audience’s mind. This is basic rhetoric.
There is just no reason to bring these subjects up in close proximity except to imply that they are related. Without assuming they are connected, he isn’t making an argument at all. Just like in your example, where you have said nothing about why you are informing us that these things are yellow.
And, yes, you are right with your specific example, but none of those have a negative connotation. If you change one of the terms to be “piss”, then you are in fact saying something negative about the other two items.
