Then you don’t fully support equal rights just as your bus analogy shows and Chief Justice Margaret Marshall spelled out. For blacks the right to ride the bus but being refused the right to choose where to sit as an equal human being was demeaning for the entire race and a reminder of what they had been told their entire lives.
You are less, not quite as good. By nature of your skin color and race you don’t deserve the same choices as the white people.
Now our gay minority is being told something similar and it’s shameful. I’ll say it again. Your “shroud of normalcy” comment is telling. Being gay is just as normal for gay people as being black is for blacks.
Personally I think the government has nothing to say about marriage and it’s status as a religious ritual and it’s only purpose is to decide what rights comitted couples have, however, we shouldn’t create two labels for that comitted relationship just to placate bigotry. Quite the contrary. There are very good reasons not to.
Groups A: Whites/Marriage
Groups B: Blacks/Civil Unions
Thing they access: Whites - frontmost seats of bus; Blacks - rearmost seats of bus/Marriage - one set of laws; Civil Unions - another set of laws.
Blacks and Whites enjoyed different access to the same bus. The bus rule wasn’t simply “Whites in the front half/Blacks in back half.” It was, “Black passengers may never sit further forward than White passengers. When the front of the bus is full of Whites, Blacks already seated must move further back so that additional White passengers may continue to sit forward of Black passengers.”
Similarly, by creating two kinds of legal partnership between two adults, we simply emphasize the inequality between the different groups.
Is this a serious question? The practice of the white passengers being the ones who decide where the black passengers get to sit. The majotity decides they have more rights than the minority. THAT practice! Since the blacks didn’t have a choose it was seperate and unequal.
That’s why your analogy fails so miserably and actually supports your opposition.
Oh, please. Do you really not get it? It’s okay that whites and blacks are called whites and blacks. What was not okay was segregating them by law. Sure they got to ride the same bus and they’d all get where they were going, but that one class of people was forced to sit in the back was not okay and was a symptom of disregard for civil rights.
It amazes me that you see absolutely nothing wrong with using the bus as an analogy to support your position. It makes you look like you liked the separate but equal laws. Considering your bluster here doesn’t actually answer my question and tries to make me look like the bad guy, I’m betting you do understand how it makes your position looks weak but you won’t admit it.
The starting point is wrong. There’s no assumption that gays are not like “normal” people, except in their sexual desires, and I doubt you disagree. That that exception seems minor to you and I does not make minor to someone else.
That you refuse to give any value to the position counter to yours means that you will be unable to change any minds. I’d live with that, but you’ve taken it to the next level, and stated that the only way into that position is malice. I don’t know about you, but I fight much harder when I’m made out to be the bad guy than I do when I just disagree with someone.
Again, you’re refusing to look at where this is coming because you don’t like where it ends up. You’re putting the cart before the horse. The opposition isn’t there because they want to deny something to gays out of malice, any more than gays want to get married to mock religious conservatives.
Because there are other places to fight that battle. This place (thread) is so we can understand our opponent on the field, and, ideally, so we don’t end up breaking things we don’t have to in order to win. While I agree with jayjay and mswas up thread that this is a culture war that only one side can win, I find that to be sad. Even if I’m on the winning side.
There is a value to understanding people, where and how they get the beliefs they have. There is a value in things that are old simply due their age. Dismissing either without effort lessens us.
I rarely find anyone that I can dismiss as only this or that. Most people have some level of complexity to them.
That it does not seem minor to someone else does not make it rational for that someone else to deny rights to marriage based on that difference. That person, to be rational, needs to explain how the difference is germane. This has not yet been done.
Does the fact that someone else think the distinction is major make it any more acceptable? Of course not.
To the contrary - for someone to drop an immoral position first requires them to be led to understand that that’s what it is.
As I said, nothing at all has been presented to the contrary. Euphemisms for malice have been rampant, though.
No, I don’t like “where it ends up” because it’s wrong. Do you think it’s not?
It’s wrong because of where it comes from, something else that I do understand and that mswas has made clear, yes.
They may not think so, but is it any less true? Slaveholders very commonly talked about how much they loved their “servants”, considered them “just like part of the family” and such - but yes, that was still malice too.
You can’t end bigotry by accepting it. You HAVE to break it. Get real.
It’s sad, too, that we no longer have plantations with happy darkies serving tea to the gowned ladies on their fainting couches, right? :dubious:
There is value to understanding how those defending a wrong can do so, yes, of course. But there is NOT value in letting that understanding lead us to allowing the wrong to continue.
We are talking *only *about attitudes toward homosexuals. Yes, it is possible to be bigoted about some people but not others, but in regard to the topic at hand, the term is inescapable.
And… We agree on this. Why bring it up? And please note, they didn’t ask to be call “white”, did they?
What are you talking about? What is shameful? That gays can enjoy all the rights they claim they want but simply use a different label. Let me as YOU this. Are you okay with the term “gay” or “homosexual”. If not, why are you so opposed to the use of a term that connotes “gay marriage”. And why aren’t you crying to the high heavens that terms like “gay” never be uttered?
In your opinion… And therre are good reasons to keep the distinction (as I’ve discussed upthread) in my opinion…
Actually, your blue’d alteration is the point he’s trying to make - that he is claiming that is not what he’s proposing. He’s proposing “We’re going to divide the people into two distinct categories with two distinct legal labels, and then let them both ride the bus with equal rights and freedoms.”
He makes two critical errors, though, in my opinion. The first being, the word marriage actually has meaning to people. And I’m not talking that “a coupling between two corporations or abstract concepts of opposing genders” codswallop. I’m talking about the fact that a marriage is indeed seen as something different than a business partnership. It’s something different than a trade transaction. It’s something different from a way to squeeze a few more rights and tax benefits out of the government. What it is, to most people, is a publicly acknowledged coupling of two people in a union of partnership, love, support, and caring. To deny people the term itself is to deny them that status, and to state that you only acknowledge they have a meaningless business contract. You are utterly dismissing that their personal relationship has any validity whatsoever.
That is a bus that magellan01 wishes to throw gay people completely off of.
The other point he is missing is that despite the fact that his proposed law initially sets the two groups as equal before the law, that the law is changeable. And that by putting gay marriages into their own separately labeled group, he is practically begging for that difference in labels to be used to gradually strip away rights from gays, or incrimentally increase the rights of heteros only (which is equivalent).
Not to mention that institutions that are not the government will be under no compulsion at all not to simply dismiss and ignore the civil unions and continue to give marrieds preferential treatment based on their “different status”.
Except that when the gays try to sit up front and call their relationship a marriage, he wants to be able to push them to the back and say, “No, you have a something else.”
It may not be what he thinks he’s proposing, but that’s what it is all the same.
Will you do me, and yourself, the honor of attempting to understand what my position is before you respond. Your change to the list above makes the analogy non-analagous. IF I suggested that the laws affecting them had some differences, then you’d be correct. But, again, and pray for the last time: ONE—ONE—set of laws. There cannot be differences in the law effecting either group because there is just the one set. There is nothing to compare it to, except itself.
Yes two differetn groups access those laws. Just as, after things were corrected, two different groups accessed the seats on the bus. All the seats. All the laws.
I hope that helps. But have no doubt it won’t for some.
You’re trying to equate ‘white’ and ‘black’ to ‘marriage’ and ‘something else’. Your previous posts indicate as much, that somehow gays wanting marriage is akin to blacks wanting to be called white. But white is to black as straight is to gay, and both whites and blacks wanted to sit up front while both straights and gays want marriage. You’re denying the gays the word marriage, just as the blacks were denied seats up front.
Same bus, sure. They were still able to get where they needed to go. Your set of laws would still allow gays to enjoy the legal protections of marriage. But that forced inequality of front and back, marriage and something else, is still there and has already been determined in the past to be unacceptable.
Ay-yay-yay. Yes it was a serious question. One that astounds me has to be asked, yet you didn’t answer. You move past that completely pointing out—shockingly—that the majority decides who gets what rights. Now it has happened in the past that the majority took advantage of their numbers. It has also been rectified. But that is not the issue we have with my idea. They all get the same legal rights and privileges. All members of both groups.
You’re problem is with labels, with words. Argue on those grounds if you’d like. Otherwise, we’re done.
I’ll also deny the word to single people, roommates, a guy and his goat, or polygamists. So what. If you’re a man and a woman and want to enter into a long term committed relationship, you can be married. If you’re other than that, you can’t. Clean. Simple.
And it’s not as “blacks were denied seats up front”. The thing that would equate to that would be the laws themselves. Think of it that way: Each seat on the bus is a law. Both groups have equal access to all seats; and both groups have equal access to all legal rights and privileges.
No. No. No. 100% wrong. All those legal protections you’re alluding to, gays would get all of them. Again (amazingly), ONE set of laws.
No it hasn’t. The first part has, but not the second.
But they can’t use the word marriage. They can’t sit up front. All the "no"s in the world doesn’t change that. You would deny them something straights get. That’s all there is to it.
If you won’t stop fucking up a simple analogy, after it’s explained in detail, more than once, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Do you truly not understand how the analogy I presented has nothing to do with your comment here. I suggest you review the pertinent exchanges.
You seem to be wanting to make a different point, which I think may be interesting, but by your insisting to shoehorn it into the same analogy it just serves to confuse things.