Telling a bigot that, despite the law, he can continue to be a bigot and still get paid does not turn a bigot gracious-it makes her/him think the battle just may not be over, especially when there are high-ranking politicians saying that very thing.
Do your job, or “x” is 100%. IMO.
Filling out a few forms isn’t that fucking hard.
I used to be a public defender. You know what? Part of the job was representing some people I didn’t like very much and who did things I didn’t approve of. But I couldn’t tell my boss, “I don’t want to defend that accused child molester today, boss, he creeps me out.” It was part of my job. Part of the job of county clerks is to issue marriage licenses. It’s a pretty easy job, and low stress too. I bet it comes with all kinds of government benefits. If serving a few gay people is too much for you, I’m sure someone else would be willing to take your job.
I also said, in that same post, that one can be gracious while also not accommodating those who refuse to comply with the law and honor their oath as public servants. Snowboarder Bo sums up my opinion nicely:
It would be bad enough if we were just talking about private businesses, but these people are civil servants, paid by taxpayer money. They should not have the right to refuse service to anyone whom they are compelled to serve under the law. Giving them any accommodation in that regard would validate their position. I don’t want them to feel validated. I want them to have to make the same choice that anyone with a job might be faced with: to do something that goes against their beliefs, or find a new job.
Long ago, I decided that I didn’t want to work on weapons of any kind, ever. As a result, I’ve had to walk away from job opportunities because I couldn’t be guaranteed that I wouldn’t be asked to work on such devices. I’ve also had to, very rarely, turn down work that I felt conflicted with my personal beliefs. And when I did it, I understood full well that I could be fired over it. I decided that it was an acceptable risk. I did not consider myself entitled to special considerations by my employer. Luckily for me, those situations were extremely rare and my employer was accommodating. But I fully understand that they had no obligation to be so, and would have been justified in firing me if they wanted to.
[Quote=Snowboarder Bo ]
Graciousness is not achieved by acquiescing to conditions or demands after you have won and the terms are set…
[/quote]
I don’t agree that the terms are set. I’m suggesting setting different terms as part of the whole process.
What are you talking about? The same-sex couple pays the standard fee and gets their license, period.
What would you change?
I’m going to graciously bow out of this little hijack since I’ve said all I have to say. To sum up: I’m not saying everyone needs to be gracious, but I am surprised at how many people want to twist the meaning of graciousness in order to justify their own lack thereof. It’s not a big deal. Very few people are fully gracious in their lives, yours truly included.
Anything else we have to say on the subject is best directed to the new thread opened on this very subject.
Door, ass.
Fundamentally I don’t care if a clerk is biased. They simply have to do their job and keep their mouth shut.
If there’s some place that wants to set up special staffing arrangements in order to retain or hire bigots, that’s also no skin off my nose. That is, as long as not one moment of the official process includes the bigot getting to express a scintilla of their bigotry to anyone.
Bigots by definition are not being gracious to the ones they refuse to serve, nor does being gracious help fight bigotry.
John Mace, would you have said the same thing in 1967 after Loving vs Virginia – should clerks who refused interracial couples have kept their jobs?
OK, one more post in this thread, but only because I like you. 
I don’t know. Were those people doing so because of a deeply held religious belief? That is a distinction I would make, even as a non-religious person myself because we do live in a religious nation. I guess the best I can answer is that I hope I would, but my graciousness might not be quite that expansive.
n.b.: By “kept their jobs” I assume you mean for some short period of time while they find other employment. That is, exactly as I outlined here for the current situation. I would not advocate letting them keep their jobs indefinitely.
Except, they had that. In Texas they had almost a year and a half actually.
I’m sorry, if your boat is sinking like the Titanic, fine. But if the hole takes 16 months, maybe you deserve to drown.
Too late, IMO. The terms are set: gay people who want to get married can legally do so. I don’t recall anything in the SCOTUS decision about being able to append that with “unless you, a clerk, don’t want them to”.
What other duties do you think government officials should get a pass on performing? :dubious:
I agree that “they should have seen it coming” or “they should have known there was good possibility it would come to pass” is the best argument against my position. But in the end, I’m only making an argument about graciousness, not about fairness. Those are two different things. I would say it’s perfectly fair to fire their asses because this wasn’t a huge surprise.
Also, I’m thinking more about states where there was no court ruling at all on SSM, and for which legal SSM only happened last week.
You want to do something that benefits the bigots, penalizes everyone else, and which will not even remotely be seen as “gracious” by the recipients, just so you get to feel better about yourself.
They had television, radio, Facebook and a shitload of office talk over the last few years. Not a single one of them lived in a intellectual and/or informational vacuum, John Mace.
What I am proposing doesn’t penalize anyone. And I want to do it because I want to live in a society where graciousness wins the day over vindictiveness. Think of it as a Buddhist thing.
Since when is it vindictive to get what you pay for? If the public pays for clerks to issue licenses to all couples, gay or straight, then said clerks better be doing just that. If said clerks are breaking the law by discriminating while on the job, is it vindictive not to look the other way?
Why don’t you save the zen buddhism schtick for an instance where you are being disadvantaged and then we’ll take your opinion into account.
How would you make the religious “distinction” – would you ask people if they didn’t want to provide services for gay/interracial couples because of “deeply held religious beliefs” vs outright bigotry?
I’m not sure why this would matter – I still don’t understand how providing and processing the forms and applications for something that one’s religious texts and leaders disapprove of actually violates one’s religion. I can understand how personally marrying someone of the same sex (or different religion, or different race) might be against someone’s deeply held religious beliefs, but there is no prohibition in any religion against filing forms and doing paperwork for a non-religious government contract.
Which is why any claim of non-bigoted opposition to gay marriage still confounds me, I suppose.