Which they?
Are you a socialist now, bitch?
You use your weapons in the culture war and we’ll use ours.
It’s absolutely hysterical the way you mouth-breathing morons act like the Democrats are going to impose socialism on you when we control all the big successful businesses. And I hope they all use their freedom of association, those freedoms you fought so long and hard for back when Christian businesses were discriminating against liberals, to shut you up and deplatform your uncivilized savage asses into oblivion.
That’s what makes watching you froth at the mouth so delicious. It’s my joy, my inspiration, my motivation. YOU fought for these laws because you thought you could use them against us. Conservatives waged a years long battle to get government out of business and allow them to self-regulate.
Be careful what you wish for, you troglodyte, because you got it. I hope this is just the beginning because you’re a fucking brain-damaged savage zombie that doesn’t deserve access to the civilized world.
I hope and pray this is just the beginning. Go fuck yourself.
There’s two aspects to this. I’m not going to walk into a church and say ‘there is no God’. But if the religious people are pushing to pass laws based on the existence of god, then I damn well should have the right to say it.
Secondly, I intended to have a discussion about free speech and not transgender issues. But what did I say that was so insulting?
Both. But first tell me which you’d be more afraid to say ‘no’ to.
No, I’m a Social Democrat. Were you the Randian? Whatever, I can’t be arsed to read the rest.
The two categories aren’t really analogous in terms of “correctness”.
Most people regard claims about the existence of a deity as statements concerning objective fact, even if we can never know definitively whether such claims are true or false (bc supernatural transcendence of material reality and all).
Most people, whether atheist or theist, agree that either there is a deity or there isn’t, and that if there is then the theists are right and the atheists are wrong, and if there isn’t then the atheists are right and the theists are wrong. Since it’s not a matter on which anyone can ever attain epistemologically guaranteed certainty, we can have different views.
But on the issue of transgender, there’s no real disagreement on matters of objective fact. Nobody is claiming, for instance, that a typical transgender woman was born with a vagina or XX chromosomes. Nobody is trying to force any cisgender people to declare that transgender women were born with vaginas or XX chromosomes.
What transgender-rights advocates and anti-transgender-rights advocates are arguing about are simply matters of semantics and culture. For example, should the word “woman” include female-identifying transgender people?
There’s no objectively true fact that can decide that question for us, because it’s not a factual issue. We as a human society can decide what we want human-defined concepts such as “gender” to mean, and how we will relate them to objective facts such as the characteristics of biological sex.
Should the word “woman” include female-identifying transgender people? Should the word “Christian” include Catholics? Should the word “married” include same-sex spouses? Should the word “mother” include adoptive mothers?
All of those questions depend on how we as a society choose to interpret those terms. And how we answer them makes the difference between whether we’re affirming or denying people’s individual identities.
Well, what Amazon does is definitely not a free speech issue, and pretending it is is an insult to our intelligence. So there’s that.
You have free speech. There’s a street corner in my town where idiots like you wave their cult flags and shake their tiny impotent fists at the sky. If you want to join them, I promise not to hit you with my car.
And atheists should have to lie, because it’s not socially acceptable. You probably think that’s normal. 
Good lord, read for comprehension.
Unless you’re claiming that Amazon can refuse to sell books about atheism, which…it totally could. And I’m okay with that. As an atheist. I wouldn’t necessarily like it, but I think they should be able to choose to refuse to sell books about atheism.
Even if you sincerely believe that society is currently getting too restrictive in what is considered acceptable for people to say, I think it’s bound to be counterproductive to advocate, as you did, that that anybody must always be able to say whatever they want in any circumstances at any time with no repercussions of any kind.
ISTM that you can’t hope to reverse what you consider a swing too far toward one extreme by declaring an absolutist position all the way at the other extreme. You’ll just get dismissed as an obviously unrealistic ridiculous absolutist.
You do have the right to say it. It’s just that you know that you be insulting, and everyone will know that your objective is to be insulting, and not to have an exchange of ideas.
Well, I don’t believe that god exists, but I do believe that women exist. So, the former, I do not believe to be correct. The latter, I have no reason to doubt them.
Well, my parents more or less disowned me, refused to help pay for college, and have written me out of their will because I don’t believe in god.
If they still had anything to hold over me, they would probably try to use it if I agreed that transwomen are women. So, I suppose it depends on context.
But I don’t share your paranoia overall, and if I shared your belief that transwomen are just faking it to sneak into the locker room, then I wouldn’t be any more afraid to say so than I would telling a group of Christians that their sky fairy doesn’t exist.
I don’t share your hateful views though, so I wouldn’t share them.
To a point I agree with you. But words are supposed to reflect actual objective things in the world, one of them being all those facts about what sex someone is. And words don’t exist in a vaccuum. When people redefine words in order to change laws, it is no longer just a matter of politeness.
Would you be happy, as a private citizen, if you had to comply with the same free speech rules as the government has to follow? With the possibility of being sued if anyone thinks you’re in breach of free speech rules?
I’m pretty sure that laws that discriminate between men and woman are pretty much illegal in america anyway.
Why do you feel the need to misrepresent my views? I just told you I think most transgender people are sincere.
I see I was right about there being pressure to pretend religion in America. Do you have any advice on dealing with believers such as yourself?
Most of those that exist are there to benefit women. For example, separate sports, scholarships, prisons.
Never pretend! Stand proud! Get disinvited from parties!
Okay, my actual approach is to make DAMN clear what my beliefs are, and push back hard against any effort to pressure me into being part of religion… but if people don’t pester me, I don’t pester them, and we get along fine.
And then come to Great Debates and debate free will with anybody foolish enough to broach the subject.
If you believed they were sincere, then you wouldn’t misgender them.
And yet, I don’t.
Do whatever you want. If you want to be insulting, then be insulting. Just don’t be double insulting in being insulting and claiming that you aren’t.
Meh, I’ll get back to that later, it was a busy day, and I had little agency left for such a discussion.
