More Gay Marriage?

[At Home 0]

Yes, it's about what the snake said.

Which was "Always drink your Ovaltine." Or "I used to fuck guys like you in prison." I tend to forget sometimes.

 

[JaMarcus Russell's #1 Caucasian Fan 0]

So pbone, do you personally think it's right for a fickle majority to vote on the rights of an unprotected minority? For example, do you think that during the Civil Rights movements, that the rights of African-Americans in America should have decided by majority rules in States and not by federal legislation?

 

 

[At Home 0]

So pbone, do you personally think it's right for a fickle majority to vote on the rights of an unprotected minority? For example, do you think that during the Civil Rights movements, that the rights of African-Americans in America should have decided by majority rules in States and not by federal legislation?

 

I already said that I'm pro-gay marriage, and just playing devil's advocate because there are a bunch of people in this thread that don't understand this argument. And that's not even what I was talking about.

[JaMarcus Russell's #1 Caucasian Fan 0]

What the fuck are we talking about? I got lost on like page 7.

 

And if you could, what is the argument that people in this thread don't understand. I see the same things argued over and over again. It got messy around page 4.

[Jingus 0]

What the fuck are we talking about? I got lost on like page 7.

Same here. So I wanna go back and address one thing:

 

Take the laws literally, and the lessons are important obviously. It's not that difficult.

Bullshit. The anti-gay law in question is in chapter 20 of Leviticus. That very same chapter also orders to execute all of the following people: anyone who worships other gods, or any child who curses at their parents, or practices any kind of magic or witchcraft, or commits any sort of adultery, anyone who has sex while the woman is having her period, and even anyone who does incest or bestiality. Not kidding, look it up yourself, DEATH for these crimes. It also says some crap about how eating insects makes your soul an abomination. Smack dab right next to the bit about how men shouldn't suck cock. Which is also mandated to be punished by death. So, which of these laws are we supposed to take literally?

[JRE 0]

The Law of Moses...the laws in the Old Testament- are the old laws. They are not valid today.

[snuffbox 0]

Except the gay one.

[JRE 0]

Well- technically speaking many Old Testament laws are repeated in the New Testament and the New Testament also references homosexuality.

 

I feel the need to equip these posts with disclaimers that: the above is not support for gay marriage to be outlawed.

[Jingus 0]

Admittedly there's also a few New Testament condemnations of teh gay, mostly Paul ranting about heathens in 1st Romans. But nearly every fundamentalist out there will always quote or paraphrase the "man shall not lie with another man" line from Leviticus, and anyway there's plenty of laughable shit to be found in the NT as well if people insist on the "Old Testament doesn't count" argument.

[JRE 0]

But it's also nonsensical that everything God would say is in the Bible- given that 1) he cares about us, 2) society changes and new problems surface, and 3) The Bible has had so much added to it, taken away, and altered.

[Czech please! 0]

¡No mas! The Bible shouldn't have anything to do with this anymore. They're citizens; let 'em marry. If the Catholic Church won't host it, have it somewhere else.

[Canadian Brandon 0]

After reading this thread and seeing where both sides are coming from, I believe that the common compromise here is the not forcing churches to marry same sex couples. I am religious, but have had several friends and teachers that were gay. Not one of them forced their sexual orientation on me, nor did I force my religious beliefs on them. It is their life, and I choose to let them live in whatever way they want, no matter if I believe that it is moral or not. I do believe in the right of the church, however, and while I would probably never vote for gay marriage as a personal moral belief, I would never tell my children or allow anyone I know to disrespect or bash someone over their sexual orientation.

[EricMM 0]

Can we get back to the "ewww gay people, WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?" issue?

 

Because I think that's the more important aspect of this argument.

 

At least I hope.

 

Religious anti-gay expression is as ridiculous as Jingus said it was. Gay sex is mentioned very infrequently in the bible. Obviously (obviously) this is an issue propagated by peoples homophobia and not their religious zeal. So many other things the bible commands both in the old and new testament (keep the Sabbath holy and do no work on Sunday?) are completly ignored in today's society. People are picking and choosing because they're scared or grossed out by gay people, just like were scared and offended by interracial ANYTHING at one point.

 

And people who claim, "This isn't like racism" are deluding themselves too with the bigot's message. "I'm not bigoted, what I'm doing isn't so bad, it's just decent/fair/reasonable/normal/whatever." If you're uncomfortable with being called bigoted or homophobic, deal with your inability to deal with telling yourself or your kid, at the age of four or six or whatever, that two guys can love each other the same way a guy and a girl can.

[HarleyQuinn 0]

If one of the big deals is around the idea of a church "forcing" to marry a gay couple or be sued... I'm not sure I can buy that. There are plenty of churches around that welcome religious gays and work gay weddings. Just like a heterosexual couple would find another church if theirs refused to marry (related to inter-religious marriages sometimes), gay couples could do exactly the same thing.

 

Not all Christian churches refuse to marry gay couples. Gay couples aren't dumb enough to not find a church that will marry them on their own and instead just sue the church that won't marry them.

 

A gay couple suing a church would make the couple idiotic morons in general if they can marry elsewhere. The big thing is... they can't marry except in 2 states.

[EricMM 0]

That Catholic Adoption agency was obviously being involved in state services in some way, maybe even getting Federal/State money?

 

And that is, by the way, the weird part. Gay people CAN get Religious-married, the church I grew up in performed those ceremonies. Or should I say they had weddings that happened to involved a same sex couple. No difference.

[snuffbox 0]

Has anybody ever advocated forcing every church to marry gay couples? Is there anything but canards on the anti- side of this issue?

[Lord of The Curry 0]

I think I might hit up the Pride Parade in Toronto for the first time this year. It's supposed to be a blast.

[JRE 0]

That Catholic Adoption agency was obviously being involved in state services in some way, maybe even getting Federal/State money?

 

The deal was that adotpion agencies in the state need to file with the state for a license. To obtain the license- the agency must swear to oblige to all state laws....which, in MA includes a law against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

 

I don't expect lawsuits from couples wanting to get married in churches that won't allow them to be an issue. Just plenty of other legal issues will pop up....here's a good section of an article on the topic:

 

Just how serious are the coming conflicts over religious liberty stemming from gay marriage?

 

"The impact will be severe and pervasive," Picarello says flatly. "This is going to affect every aspect of church-state relations." Recent years, he predicts, will be looked back on as a time of relative peace between church and state, one where people had the luxury of litigating cases about things like the Ten Commandments in courthouses. In times of relative peace, says Picarello, people don't even notice that "the church is surrounded on all sides by the state; that church and state BUTT up against each other. The boundaries are usually peaceful, so it's easy sometimes to forget they are there. But because marriage affects just about every area of the law, gay marriage is going to create a point of conflict at every point around the perimeter."

 

For scholars, these will be interesting times: Want to know exactly where the borders of church and state are located? "Wait a few years," Picarello laughs. The flood of litigation surrounding each point of contact will map out the territory. For religious liberty lawyers, there are boom times ahead. As one Becket Fund donor told Picarello ruefully, "At least you know you're not in the buggy whip business."

 

Picarello is a Harvard-trained litigator experienced in religious liberty issues. But predicting the legal consequences of as big a change as gay marriage is a job for more than one mind. So last December, the Becket Fund brought together ten religious liberty scholars of right and left to look at the question of the impact of gay marriage on the freedom of religion. Picarello summarizes: "All the scholars we got together see a problem; they all see a conflict coming. They differ on how it should be resolved and who should win, but they all see a conflict coming."

 

These are not necessarily scholars who oppose gay marriage. Chai Feldblum, for example, is a Georgetown law professor who refers to herself as "part of an inner group of public-intellectual movement leaders committed to advancing LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual] equality in this country." Marc Stern is the general counsel for the center-left American Jewish Congress. Robin Wilson of the University of Maryland law school is undecided on gay marriage. Jonathan Turley of George Washington law school has supported legalizing not only gay marriage but also polygamy.

 

Reading through these and the other scholars' papers, I noticed an odd feature. Generally speaking the scholars most opposed to gay marriage were somewhat less likely than others to foresee large conflicts ahead--perhaps because they tended to find it "inconceivable," as Doug Kmiec of Pepperdine law school put it, that "a successful analogy will be drawn in the public mind between irrational, and morally repugnant, racial discrimination and the rational, and at least morally debatable, differentiation of traditional and same-sex marriage." That's a key consideration. For if orientation is like race, then people who oppose gay marriage will be treated under law like bigots who opposed interracial marriage. Sure, we don't arrest people for being racists, but the law does intervene in powerful ways to punish and discourage racial discrimination, not only by government but also by private entities. Doug Laycock, a religious liberty expert at the University of Texas law school, similarly told me we are a "long way" from equating orientation with race in the law.

 

By contrast, the scholars who favor gay marriage found it relatively easy to foresee looming legal pressures on faith-based organizations opposed to gay marriage, perhaps because many of these scholars live in social and intellectual circles where the shift Kmiec regards as inconceivable has already happened. They have less trouble imagining that people and groups who oppose gay marriage will soon be treated by society and the law the way we treat racists because that's pretty close to the world in which they live now

 

 

So. We'll see in time what goes down.

 

This is not reason for rights to be restricted from gays- just reason for concern on the religious end.

[EricMM 0]

The deal was that adotpion agencies in the state need to file with the state for a license. To obtain the license- the agency must swear to oblige to all state laws....which, in MA includes a law against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

 

Right so obviously by indicating that they were discriminatory the Catholic Church proved that they were not ideal people to be handling adoption.

 

I...don't see the problem here.

[Atticus Chaos 0]

And people who claim, "This isn't like racism" are deluding themselves too with the bigot's message. "I'm not bigoted, what I'm doing isn't so bad, it's just decent/fair/reasonable/normal/whatever." If you're uncomfortable with being called bigoted or homophobic, deal with your inability to deal with telling yourself or your kid, at the age of four or six or whatever, that two guys can love each other the same way a guy and a girl can.

 

 

While there are some similarities, my problem is that the comparision gets brought up all the time. I'ts been said to me at least 2 or 3 times, throughout this thread, and probably a dozen times overall. It's laziness. No-one can argue anything about strategy or suggest compromise without someone resorting to comparing it to the civil rights movement in the sixties because they can't think of anything better to argue. It's not the same thing to most people. And the insistence that is the the same thing, is probably why gay marriage supporters have been losing ethnic minority voters. Look, if ethnic minorities don't accept the gay/race comparision, and most of them don't if polls are anything to go by, who am I to argue? They know better than I would.

 

 

As for the schools: I believe in people minding their own business. Gay people should be allowed to mind their own business and get married, and parents should be allowed to tell their kids about sexuality when they feel the time is right. The best thing is to have gay marriage, but not teach in it schools, and that way no one feels like anyone's beliefs are being forced on them. The people insisting on having gay marriage and teaching it in elementry school , against the parents will, are doing the cause more harm than good. Sometimes you have to tolerate a certain level of intolerance.

[HarleyQuinn 0]

Gays did march during the late 1960's and 1970's during the latter part of the civil rights movement as a point of fact. It's where the gay pride marches first developed.

 

Of course, their struggle is still continuing almost 40 years later but it's shifted from just equal rights to now also include marriage.

[Atticus Chaos 0]

Gays did march during the late 1960's and 1970's during the civil rights movement as a point of fact. It's where the gay pride marches first developed.

 

Of course, their struggle is still continuing almost 40 years later but it's shifted from just equal rights to now also include marriage.

 

 

I'm not saying what they did or didn't do, or that it hasn't been going on for years, but if you know the race comparision doesn't work with the majority of people, and it in fact can backfire and alienate minorites, why keep making it?

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Another problem in this thread is that most of us are arguing about whether gay marriage should or should not be legal white Atticus Chaos is arguing about a strategy for making it so.

[Atticus Chaos 0]

Another problem in this thread is that most of us are arguing about whether gay marriage should or should not be legal white Atticus Chaos is arguing about a strategy for making it so.

 

 

Strategy is probably a better conversation topic than talking snakes.

 

Also, I've actually argued against the whole 'it just makes them feel icky' rhetoric as to why the majority of people have not yet come around to gay marriage.

[HarleyQuinn 0]

I'm not saying what they did or didn't do, or that it hasn't been going on for years, but if you know the race comparision doesn't work with the majority of people, and it in fact can backfire and alienate minorites, why keep making it?

 

Because that's the most similar struggle that has occurred in the United States that we (LGBT) can compare our struggles to. Who else can we compare to? One could say the Irish or Chinese I guess but then they'd take offense. It's not like we've been absent in situations where blacks were discriminated against (Germany under the Nazis, 1960's and 1970's movement) so why should we pretend that our struggle is any less meaningful than theirs? Just to satisfy them and give them the honor of going through a bigger struggle and arguably overcoming it?

 

Are we supposed to say, "Well... our struggles have been going on for over a century but our rights can partly be overlooked just because we didn't have to go through what ___ minority went through"?

[Atticus Chaos 0]

I'm not saying what they did or didn't do, or that it hasn't been going on for years, but if you know the race comparision doesn't work with the majority of people, and it in fact can backfire and alienate minorites, why keep making it?

 

Because that's the most similar struggle that has occurred in the United States that we (LGBT) can compare our struggles too. Who else can we compare too? One could say the Irish or Chinese I guess but then they'd take offense. It's not like we've been absent in situations where blacks were discriminated against (Germany under the Nazis, 1960's and 1970's movement) so why should we pretend that our struggle is any less meaningful than theirs? Just to satisfy them and give them the honor of going through a bigger struggle and arguably overcoming it?

 

Are we supposed to say, "Well... our struggles have been going on for over a century but our rights can partly be overlooked just because we didn't have to go through what ___ minority went through"?

 

Pissing off ethnic minority groups, just to so you can evoke their experience and claim their moral superiorty, seems somewhat counterproductive. At the very least, if you're going to make that comparision, knowing full well they don't like it, you can't complain when 60% or 70% of minorites continue to vote against it.

 

Instead of comparing it to one racial group or another, don't compare the gay marriage cause to anything, and let it speak for itself.

[EricMM 0]

Because it is blatantly offensive to my mind that the gays have such persecution and are seemingly ignored by other minorities like blacks, when they themselves were oppressed just as much, simply because conservative Christianity is popular among the black population.

 

The Church was certainly implicit in the enslavement of blacks in the first place, they need to understand how their struggles are the same, or they're as guilty of the same, "It's not me, it's not my problem" mindset that white people had when it came to the abolition movement or civil rights.

 

In other words, just because some black people don't think the two are the same doesn't make them right, it makes them wrong.

[Atticus Chaos 0]

Because it is blatantly offensive to my mind that the gays have such persecution and are seemingly ignored by other minorities like blacks, when they themselves were oppressed just as much, simply because conservative Christianity is popular among the black population.

 

The Church was certainly implicit in the enslavement of blacks in the first place, they need to understand how their struggles are the same, or they're as guilty of the same, "It's not me, it's not my problem" mindset that white people had when it came to the abolition movement or civil rights.

 

In other words, just because some black people don't think the two are the same doesn't make them right, it makes them wrong.

 

EricMM, you can't tell people how to feel about this. If they don't think it's good comparision, then who is to tell them their wrong for feeling like that? I'm not going to pretend I know better than someone who's lived their life as an ethnic minority. There's even been GLBT minorities who have said themselves it's not the best comparision to make and you can't say they're bigoted.

 

 

Also, I think if No on 8 had came out and explicitly said, like you, that gay people now are 'oppressed just as much' as black people in the past....eh, it would not have been taken well.

[SuperJerk 0]

One of the main differences between homosexuals and racial minorities is that homosexuals can pretend to be straight. They've escaped a lot of persecution that way, whereas minorities could not.

[snuffbox 0]

That's not a good thing.