If you would ever take the trouble to explain WHY you insist on refusing the word “marriage” to gays, and WHAT is different about the bus analogy, then it would help the discussion quite a bit.
But you just won’t. What else is to be concluded from that?
In a conventional hetero marriage, does the husband have any special rights the wife doesn’t? Does the wife have any special rights the husband doesn’t? If not, would it be safe to say the gender has no special role within marriage? If not, why not?
That from someone who protests the “demonization” of those who disagree with him. :dubious:
The statement is bigoted, yes. It demands that certain people deny who they are because, in effect, “God said so. End of discussion.” That is malicious, perhaps even worse because couching it in religious terms absolves the self of responsibility for it and its effects.
Another inversion of reason. Once one side has declared in effect that second-class personhood is acceptable and that their reasons are not open to exploration, *then * it becomes impossible. But that’s exactly what our friend mswas is demanding, that his positions not be open to discussion but must merely be respected. That is despite his insistence that it’s a “holistic system of morality rooted in ancient tradition”, not a simple rationalization that has become tolerated over centuries of repetition.
His insistence that it is more than that, that those opposing bigotry are simply refusing respect “the intellectual institutions that spawned these kinds of thoughts and never question why these institutions may have come to the conclusions that they did” ignores the possibility that we do understand the process, and that the defenders of it should be able to explain the “intellectual process” that led to their position if it were indeed intellectual, a process, or even holistic. You fail to note that he hasn’t done so, and can’t, but, like you, can only bewail the dying of a “culture” that enshrines the malice of defining a second-class personhood and demanding that certain people thereby “stay in their place”.
The bolded is exactly what I’m doing. Marriage itself is a specific legal right so therefore, according to your bizarre twist on a perfectly good analogy, a seat. Is that seat at the front of the bus? Can they sit in it?
The overwhelming majority put those who didn’t think gays should allowed to be married in the “Is a homophobe” camp, with the only main objections being from those who didn’t think gays should allowed to be married. The thread is still available, if you wish to revisit it.
But I can’t separate what I do from what I am. If what I do is sinful, then so am I. And if you believe that your sex life is good and mine is sinful, that’s bigotry.
There are lots of otherwise good people who oppose SSM. Pointing out bigotry and homophobic behavior doesn’t mean they’re evil, it means they’re mistaken. My friends tell me I’m wrong when they think so and sometimes they’re pissed off when they do so. We’re still friends.
I don’t agree. People can sincerely believe their own bigotry, especially in light of general ignorance and misunderstanding. They’re honest, but still, concerning this topic, their attitude is bigoted.
Was it bigotry when people sincerely believed black people {and any race other than their own} were inferior?
The question was answered. You don’t like the answer so so you continue to deny the implications.
You admit the majority decides who has what rights but what you won’t admit is historically the majority has consistently been wrong when they attempt to justify not giving the minority equal rights.
“But they ARE equal” you insist and you’ve tried to explain that. No Sir! They clearly are not when the majority declares to the minority "You can do A,B, and C just like we can {aren’t we being nice to you?} but we declare you can’t do D and you if do something close to D you have to call it something else.
When that happens, just as it has happened in the past, the majority needs to be corrected, just as you have been.
Right, the majority rarely corrects itself. Appeals to conscience rarely affect ingrained behavior patterns and attitudes, especially those that are constantly reinforced by association with others who share them, and most especially if they’re further reinforced by alleged religious doctrine. Nothing was gained by a century of tolerating Jim Crow, the “we’re just not ready yet” and “maybe someday” attitudes toward race except the continuation of a wrong. Only confrontation worked, only breaking the “culture” of racism instead of waiting for it to disappear on its own worked. Only discarding the notion that that “culture” was in any way acceptable, or worth respect, or whose passing was not to be regretted, worked. Only those things worked to get women an equal right to vote, earlier, either. And, it follows, only those things have worked so far for the antihomophobia view.
A question for Redwing and mswas, if I may: You’ve both asserted that you really do support equal rights for homosexuals, and that the reasons for opposition you have presented are merely objective observations from the outside about those who profess them. Obviously you must have found the arguments, or attitudes, in opposition to be superior when you made your decisions to support equal rights nonetheless. Would you care to tell us what made you conclude the views you’ve articulated for us so passionately are actually inferior?
Having slept on it, I think magellan01’s proposal isn’t so much a back-of-the-bus idea. Instead it’s more like if the city of Montgomery had responded to Rosa Parks by doubling the number of buses and drivers and having a set of buses for blacks and a set for whites. And of course a law mandating that the black buses and white buses will follow identical schedules of stops. Of course, since it would be socially awkward to get on the wrong bus, we need a name to distinguish the two buses. Since many of the white passengers are attached to the name ‘bus’ (besides, we’ve never used the word ‘bus’ to apply to an all-Negro conveyance and it sure would be imprecise language to stretch the word ‘bus’ for such a purpose), let’s call the vehicle for the black passengers a ‘civil transport unit.’ It solves all the problems: a black passenger won’t be forced to give up his or her seat to a white rider; a black passenger who felt the back of the bus was somehow demeaning will be able to ride in the front of the civil transport unit. Some may argue it’s perpetuating ‘separate but equal,’ but that’s ridiculous since all riders, regardless of race, are passengers of the same municipal transportation system.
Well from a Christian perspective. Treating homosexuality as a graver sin than many other sins is counter-productive. IE, it is not the government’s place to make a good Christian, but to keep order among the populace. Homosexuality doesn’t hurt anyone and therefore it is value neutral in terms of societal effect. The state of adoption/foster care today is deplorable with some truly awful people getting foster children for the money, enabled by simply being heterosexual. If homosexuals could adopt then it would theoretically expand the pool of qualified candidates and therefore the agencies could discriminate MORE but by criteria that ACTUALLY affect the child’s well-being. I’d rather see a loving homosexual couple raise an abandoned child than a callous heterosexual one. This is more important for foster care than for infant adoption, because infants are adopted more easily by people who really want children without regard to the monetary remuneration.
Also, societal structure has changed to the point where hereditary hierarchical family models no longer order our civilization so there isn’t the possibility of serious consequences for families if their children do not breed, other than the consequence of their genetic legacy not being passed along. In the era of the Nation-State it’s not like antiquity where the survival of the tribe really did depend upon people breeding as much as possible. Yes, there are Nations like Russia that are genuinely threatened by demographic decline, but there are a whole litany of issues besides homosexuality that are contributing factors.
So to recap: If something is victimless it should not be a crime. If something is a moral sin on a personal/soul level that is between a wo/man their religion and their God and not between them and the Government.* Society is no longer based on extended family structures.
Does that make sense to you?
*I am not saying homosexuality IS sinful. I don’t know whether it’s a sin or not. I don’t really have an opinion on that one.
But only within the city of Montgomery - you can take a civil transport unit out to the suburbs, but there’s no guarantee that you go any further. And there is still the possibility that they will cancel the 12:10 civil transport unit route, without letting you on the 12:10 bus that follows the same route at the same time.
Really? One might suspect otherwise based on these statements:
Does it make sense to you? Is being a “good Christian”, as you define the term, truly consistent with relegating others of God’s children to a lesser status? Is there something more positive to your attitude than a reluctant acceptance of the inevitable?
Try this:
Great. But how about if the love is equal? Do you have a preference then? Why or why not?
Except that that doesn’t fit either. Since straights can get civil unions, they can ride both busses.
As for the part I bolded, it not only perpetuates “separate but equal”, it actually makes the segregation of the two “groups” worse.
Especially since the federal government has a law that other jurisdictions are not required to recognize civil transport units whose schedules conflict with their own.
But we’ve got a law requiring them to follow the same schedules! There’s no way they could possibly change it for only one of the routes, right?
Not to mention the fact that no one can seem to come up with a good reason for the two sets of buses running the same routes in the first places. The primary reason given seems to be that a few people on the white bus don’t want to have to ride with the black people, even though it has zero impact on the purpose of the bus, which is to get them from point A to point B.
Hey I like this analogy. It does seem more accurate and it shows how ridiculous it is. Thanks
Since a few posters {you know who you are} seem to think it’s perfectly fine and just for the majority to vote on what rights a minority should have or what words they are allowed to use perhaps you can come up with some historic example of when that kind of thing has worked out fine for all concerned and history hasn’t shown them to be wrong. Anyone…?
And the drivers of the civil transport vehicles have very lax rules about punctuality, customer service and other crucial aspects of a public accommodation. Meanwhile, drivers of buses have a high standard to meet in regard to these things, and are extensively trained in them.
And the civil transport vehicles are not only frequently late (or just don’t show up at all) they’re regularly dirty, in grave disrepair and it’s not unusual for them to just break down on the side of the road completely. And the civil transport drivers don’t ever bother calling in to dispatch to get a second vehicle sent out to pick up stranded passengers, they just have to fend for themselves.
But if people who can ride buses choose to ride a civil transport vehicle and find that the degradation in service is an inconvenience to them, they can, at any time, stop riding civil transport and start riding buses. Not every civil transport passenger has that option. So no, they’re not equivalent.
(Seriously, this is a direct corollary. In the Jim Crow south, a white person faced absolutely no legal penalty – though perhaps a social penalty amongst their peers – for using public facilities that were labeled for “coloreds” but the reverse was not true.)