Many of us view being anti-gay just as absolutely unacceptable as being pro-slavery or denying suffrage to women. It's not simply a "political view" in 2014. It's not an opinion. It's flat out wrong and supporters of that backwards mentality reap what they sow.
It would be nice if the world were that black-and-white, but it's not. Plenty of Republicans etc. also believe that abortion, or even contraception provided by your health plan, is "absolutely unacceptable", "flat out wrong" and a "backwards mentality".
But we live in a democracy, where we need to get along. Black-and-white absolutist thinking doesn't really help anyone. You may not think it's "simply a political view" in 2014, but many other people do. Fortunately, we live in a pluralistic society with freedom of expression where we're all allowed to have and share our views, which is the whole basis of democracy.
And this is very different from women's suffrage, because nobody's right to vote, or their participation in the democratic process, is being legally affected here. Other things are being affected, but not people's representation as citizens in a democracy.
People seem to miss something from this whole "free speech" thing. Feel free to speak your mind, but that will always invite other people judging you and their interactions with you based on what you say (which is of course perfectly sane).
I'll happily defend your right to anonymously spout homophobic nonsense on 4chan, but as soon as you attach your name (and a thousand bucks) to discriminating people based on their sexual orientation, I'll exercise my right to shun you for it.
That right is, presumably, something you revoke when joining a ‘open-minded and tolerant’ community -- something that both Mozilla and OkCupid asked their employees to do.
That’s why, to justify shunning from someone within that group, you need to qualify supporting Prop 8 as abhorrent: something outside of Free speech.
I’ve posted a few comments already, so I feel the need to clarify my position: I have an opinion; I never shared it with anyone, ever. What I know however, from knowing many people on any sides of however you want to split this, is best said here:
Would I have happily embraced slavery if born at the time? Not a doubt in the world. Surely my peers would have considered themselves open-minded and tolerant just as much.
Here is what this comes down to: is there an overall shift in societies sentiment on this issue towards tolerance and against discrimination? If yes, you don't want to be standing on the wrong side of history by publicly expressing your disagreement.
> If yes, you don't want to be standing on the wrong side of history by publicly expressing your disagreement.
Lincoln was very much on the wrong side of history, and even in his time many abolitionists argued that it was horribly immoral to allow slavery where it existed, or to end slavery only in military-occupied areas of the Confederacy. Should we have shunned him then?
This is exactly why I don't like black/white mob rule, FWIW. Life's too complex to be reduced to a set of tripwires that define our behavior. Evolution has provided us all with the most advanced processing devices on this planet, we should all feel free to use them to examine a given case on its own merits.
I know… I’m just trying to defend the good side, which is always the one listening first.
As for history, it’s a forgiving mistress: always remember that the one absolute, un-impeachable moral hero of all modern history was an openly incestuous child molestor, and that all his friends and relatives begged him daily to stop.
OkCupid is not advocating restricting Eich's right to participate in civic society, to spout his hate, or even his ability to spend money to promote restricting the lives of others.
They are simply and clearly pointing out that he seeks "to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration" They don't want to associate with him, and they are recommending that other people avoid doing so.
OkCupid calling out a powerful person on his despicable behavior does not threaten democracy.
OkCupid is not calling out Eich personally, but Mozilla because of Eich’s individual position. There is a gap there that they, as an institution, decided to bridge. If you apply the same brush to OkCupid, their don’t sound so different they can give a lesson they needn’t listen too.
Democracy is not threatened in this debate -- however, consistency might not be on OkCupid’s side.
certainly well written, and you are right nobodies' right to vote is being abridged here. however the constitution of the United states affords us many rights one of which is the right to due process and equal protection(14th amendment).
wikipedia> nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Equal protection has been used repeatedly in the courts as a way to show the clear and un-bar-able "right to contract" protecting companies and individuals right to make agreements and have them be enforced and recognized by the state.
looking at the nuts and bolts way that the state approaches "marriage" as a form of contract similar to a corporate merger: tax differences, medical rules regulations, inheritance, general ownership of property. Baring an entire group of people from this right to contract is very clearly an abridgment of those rights and the protections brought by that form of contract.
This is why this issue has made such clearer and easy headway in the courts where the rulings are based more clearly on the law it self and the precedent of situation.
your argument though well written is more of a red herring fallacy trying to distract from a very real issue that you paint as more serious to trivialize what is really an important issue in our system of governance.
The women's suffrage movement was more than just the right to vote it spoke to how we define equality in this country. And this modern incarnation of that same discussion (which has taken many shapes over the years color, disability, language) is similarly important though it may feel distant to YOU because it impacts a sub-segment of the population not as large as say 50%.
Segregation, marriage inequality, restrictions on abortion and contraception--what do each of these have in common? It's that the government is imposing an arbitrary value system on the behavior of private citizens. This is acceptable when said behavior could harm others. In these other cases, it feels pretty off to have this happening in 2014. (Do not respond to me about fetuses.)
I love when people end an argument with "Do not respond to me about <the obviously controversial part of my opinion>".
The fact is, people from all backgrounds and political viewpoints hold opinions which they view as absolute. Whether that's "being anti-gay is equivalent to being pro-slavery" or "abortion is murder", people are going to disagree even if they are both guided by the same fundamentally good goals.
I fully admit that it's controversial, I just don't have the time or the energy to debate it here. (Or anywhere.) The rationale I gave holds up, but good luck debating it.
Abortion ban: government-imposed restrictions on the right to terminate genetically-undesirable fetuses. Which of these criteria should not be allowed: Gender? Height? Lack of physical strength? How about, say, statistically-probable homosexuality?
All is not as it seems when you change the optics (edited, restored).
I admit, those scenarios are almost as odious as they are unbelievable. People already select for height, strength and a host of other genetic characteristics when they mate. But anyways, mother's choice. Her body, her choice. Very simple.
Sex-selective abortion is abhorrent, but it's not at all unbelievable. The others are mostly hypothetical - for now - but amniocentesis and genetic testing for specific diseases is a very real thing, and the steady march of GWAS means we will have the rest soon enough.
That's the libertarian stance. If the gov't had nothing to do with marriage and people were free to enter into whatever contract each party agreed to, we wouldn't be wasting time arguing about gay marriage.
It's only because assholes go crazy about it that it's a problem.
Also, gay couples have been doing the "set up a bundle of contracts" thing for years. It's expensive and doesn't actually provide the same protections that marriage provides.
Well, demographics is not exactly fætuses… close though.
Some people justify their intervention in all these issues by claiming that the up-coming generations are everyone‘s future, and needs to be protected as such. Hence many laws to prevent them from harm, most of which I’m sure you adhere to.
The salient cases are often about disagreement about which is the greater harm: being Métis in a race-based, or living in a race-based society? Some (abortion) are about disagreements on what constitutes a child.
I don’t think that you, or rather some other people on the same side as you on such issues, choose to make themselves better persons by disparaging your opponents openly. Like you, they are worried, and inconsistent. And, if you step away from absolutes, they would agree with you on many actual cases. Cognitive dissonance (which, admittedly, happens more often among your opponents) is very painful, and you want to respect that to effectively make the world a better place.
This does impact a person's federal rights in the democracy that they participate in though. Specifically, over 1,100 rights are denied to couples who love each other but happen to be the same gender.
All men are created equal, right?
Gay couples are disadvantaged at a federal level. Being able to vote doesn't change that.
I'm liberal, and I believe society should be as permissive as it can stand to be with regard to behavior, choices, and the kinds of lifestyles we can create. But I'm not an idiot. Abortion is perhaps the only thing you could have used as an argument here. It's obvious to me why people have a problem with abortion. Even people who had one probably didn't like it. But I don't care enough about it to try to prevent anyone from having one.
Gay rights aren't abortion. Enough people believe it is exactly like every other precedent for civil rights, that you can't really seriously hold onto this argument anymore. Sorry. And absolutely nobody said it had to be about voting, so where did you pull that out of?
I've always thought "anti-gay marriage = anti-gay" as being a false equivocation. Can someone convince me otherwise?
Heck, at the very least there are people who are anti-marriage (from a political POV), for whom it would be discriminatory to exclude gay marriage from that position.
You cite slavery. Was every single person who was against emancipation "pro-slavery"? Was there no room for nuance? I mean maybe some people really didn't like slavery, but hated the prospect of civil war even more.
Because marriage isn't just some symbolic institution. Denying marriage to couples radically, unequivocally, directly harms them in legal matters like being able to make medical decisions during emergencies, property rights, benefits at work.
So when someone is "anti-gay marriage", then yes they are taking a position that will harm gay folks. So yes, it is anti-gay.
And yet, put it that way to a gay marriage opponent, and I guarantee you a sizable portion would respond as follows:
A: You're against gay marriage? So you don't think gay partners should share the same legal status when making medical decisions, in property rights, or work benefits?
B: Wow, I never thought about it that way. No, I think they should share all of those benefits.
A: So you're for gay marriage?
B: No, I just think all of those rights should be granted outside of the marital context.
That's the frustrating part about this issue...it's basically all semantics. The simple solution would have been to remove all recognition of marriage by the government and replace it with the concept of civil unions between any two consenting adults. There shouldn't even be a requirement of a romantic relationship...why should the fact that two people have sex or live together have any bearing on how they file their tax returns, how medical decisions are made or how property is disposed of? Hell, there's plenty of married people who are separated and no longer having sex or live together and yet they enjoy the legal perks of marriage.
Once you limit the government's role to recognizing a contract, albeit one that's common and standardized, between two adults, marriage becomes the domain of the church. If your church wants to deny marriage to homosexuals, the first amendment gives them the right to do that.
Your "simple solution" would require the invalidation of all straight people's marriages. Politically, that's about as toxic as proudly saying you are going to be building a pre-school on top of a nuclear waste dump.
Exactly. Reading this thread, I get the distinct impression that many posters have never even interacted with someone who disagrees with them on some of these issues. As someone who grew up in the midwest, I've seen this exact exchange happen countless times.
Riding on the back of the bus gets you to the same bus stops, clearly. Yet we rejected Jim Crow laws decades ago as unsuitable in our modern society.
Letting some citizens ride on the 'civil union' bus, and others on the 'marriage' bus is what's at issue. Its still wrong to discriminate in this way, especially if the majority vote to give themselves the better seats.
I imagine its hard to feel the humiliation of sitting in the back of the bus, if you never have to do it yourself. It took Rosa Parks to make it plain to all of us, that the institution was racist, intentionally belittling and wrong.
I know there are sizeable number of people who support giving gay couples all the property, legal, etc. rights under "civil union" umbrella but oppose calling it "marriage" under religious or cultural or any other notions. I personally think governmental sanction on marriage is a problem here and as soon as people are ready to do the right thing - meaning, take government permission out of this voluntary contract and leave the government only to be notified that such contract happened and not permit or deny it - all the problem goes away. But I certainly can see that these people I describe above is not for limiting legal rights of gay people in medical decisions, property rights, etc. but they object to that being called "marriage". This is their position, and denying its existence does not really help anybody.
ywgdana, your definition of marriage is joined with legal matters, but don't assume others will share the same definition. Little girls don't dream of having "property rights" they dream of "getting married".
And you're wrong that anti-gay marriage = anti-gay. I take offence to that.
I don't give a damn about marriage in general. But I DO give a damn about gay folks, their rights and equality.
I have very dear gay friends, and care about them deeply. But I don't put marriage and their rights to make medical decisions in the same boat, and nor should you. Instead, you should be voting and fighting for those legal rights to be extended to same-sex couples, and leave marriage completely out of the equation.
"Marriage" is an old-fashioned tradition, very much about a bride and groom and the beginnings of starting a family, kids and all the rest. That's what it is.
> Was every single person who was against emancipation "pro-slavery"?
Yes! What other position could there be? You either think human beings can be owned as property or you don't.
I guess theoretically you could have favored some sort of gradual emancipation over immediate freedom, and there were some at the time who argued that freed slaves should have been returned to Africa.
But those are still just variations of an anti-slavery position.
You can't be against emancipation without being pro-slavery any more than you can be against animal cruelty but pro-dog fighting.
Sorry, to be clear I meant "against emancipation" as "against a particular political proposal to enact emancipation". Maybe call it "capital 'e' Emancipation", for my lack of knowledge of American history. Obviously you're right that to be against the idea of emancipation is to be pro-slavery.
But to oppose a specific political position is much more nuanced. There were many people who opposed Obamacare on the grounds that it didn't go far enough. You couldn't automatically say they were against universal health care.
Many people oppose legislation that they would otherwise support because they are rolled up in an omnibus bill they can't support, or because the devil in the details would make it counterproductive to their cause.
You misunderstand; I never said I was against gay marriage, and don't need convincing.
I just think people need to be more careful when they ascribe motives (being "anti-gay") to political views that might incidentally oppress people ("anti-gay marriage").
That kind of in-your-face aggression makes people defensive and withdrawn, rather than engaged and ready to be convinced.
It's like if someone is for strict crack cocaine punishments, and somebody just saying "well being blatantly racist toward African Americans is unacceptable". Maybe they just hadn't yet connected the dots from their political position to the incidental impact it has on people.
Yikes, people obviously feel strongly about this as they are downvoting comments clearly made in good faith.
> Being anti-gay marriage directly means "I want gay people to not have the following rights: x, y and z," and in that sense it is directly anti-gay.
It is more direct, but not absolutely direct. People get religious over the word "marriage", which shouldn't be surprising because in a lot of ways it's primarily a religious concept. A lot of them actually don't mind if gay people have rights x, y, and z. But by framing the whole conversation around "marriage", it bypasses the question of rights for a lot of people. It jumps right to challenging their long-held, internalized view of what the word "marriage" means.
And that might be an important thing to challenge! But for a lot of people it's a separate issue from the rights question.
My experience is that a lot of the people who opposed official recognition of gay couples don’t connect the two, even when faced with such a case. Few people have been in a situation when that actually was a problem, grave enough to require family presence, and the family would refuse to share information, or the nurses would block the way.
The principle of it is wrong, but opponents don’t connect the dots.
One is religious, and I doubt you’d sympathise with that; let’s just say an easy way out of that one would be to defining all civil unions as such, but it actually would miss some point.
Another one is biologic: heterosexual couples are expected to have children. Of course, that should mean that couples without shouldn’t benefit, but they might be considered saving money while planning, and there is the embarrassing debate about what to do with people marrying in their 40s… That goes against the increasingly visible case of gay couples adopting, or using donations/surrogates. But the idea is: that tax benefit and public recognition is a natalist argument.
And the important point here isn't the validity of these arguments, it's that people do use them to inform their position on gay marriage, and that that is orthogonal to being "anti-gay".
I’ll jump on my militant stead now, and attack you bitterly on one of the things I actually care deeply about: the abuse of the idea of ‘perpendicular’ in non-obvious algebraic context.
(I’m like that: you can way what you want is subjective, but Statistical methodology… I instantly switch to heavy weaponry and my loud voice.)
If you mean conceptually independant: absolutely. Social recognition of a homosexual orientation has been associated with many choice patterns, most of which didn’t include marriage, mainly because that hasn’t been a historically considered model: priesthood, separation of family ties and sexual pleasures, even projection onto educational purposes…
If you mean “statistically not correlated”, then you are wrong: there is a high correlation between people holding unambiguously homophobic position, and them opposing same-sex marriage.
You can’t consider one in abstract without the other.
Let’s take an example: There is little logical connection between being rich and behaving like a jerk, yet… psychological experiments tend to indicate the former appears to cause the later. If you want a more honest society and a fair market, that correlation needs to be considered to inform reforms. There is little formal connexion between coding and favoring libertarian ideas, yet… that happens a lot, and it does influence the role of technology in society. If you held sincerely an opinion that is mainly shared by jerks, that’s fine if you are not one -- but you can’t expect to defend it without some preliminaries; not excuses, just precautions.
It doesn’t, but it appropriates an institution meant to protect childbirth for a different purpose. It denatures something seen as precious.
That can seem meaningless to a liberal, but conservatives have a heighten sense of ‘purity’, and tend to vehemently refuse misappropriations or risk of ‘contamination’, sometimes beyond the scale of the real issue. Examples in the US include: ‘sacred’ money meant for church should not be taxed by secular government, or, benefits meant for people in need should not go to undeserving people; one should not indulge people who commit crimes; young impressionable teens should not frequent lost souls, etc.
And to be clear: yes, that should mean people shouldn’t marry after menopause -- rationalisation of that include continuity, traditions or even direct reference to Abraham and Sarah. Details are probably more individual.
What matters is that you understand there is a consistency to the over-all idea, in spite of the apparent contradictions, and you can’t move forward unless you make sense of it. It‘s the classic exercice in rhetoric of being able to convincingly prove the opposite of your position in order to be able to defend it.
Mutual care. If you are married (or in a civil union or domestic partnership or whatever separate-but-equal code word people want to use to grant gay people almost-but-not-equal rights), you engage in mutual care for one another. You look after each other when sick, you cover for each other's temporary financial shortcomings (when they lose a job for instance). You provide a whole lot of care that if you weren't together would be something that society would have to provide, especially in older age.
Take my paternal grandparents. When my grandmother was still alive, the two of them happily lived together and cared for one another even though my grandfather was at that point experiencing the early onset of dementia.
When she died, my grandfather had to go into residential care, paid for partly by their pension, partly by my parents and uncles, and partly through the subsidy that the state provide for elderly people going into care homes.
The more people who are able to live together in a mutually caring relationship like a long-term marriage, the less people need to go into care homes meaning the less subsidy needs to go into that kind of care for the elderly.
Marriage has a societal benefit in promoting that kind of mutual care, regardless of the gender of the partners and regardless of whether you have kids (and, hell, same-sex couples can and do have kids, so that's a shit argument anyway).
Could you set up another system to provide that kind of benefit? Sure. But this is the system we have and it should be available to long-term gay couples as it is for straight couples.
IMHO, children. Married couples get tax benefits as an incentive to get married and have kids. I find it weird that this argument has so far been completely ignored by either side in the pro/anti-gay marriage discussion (at least as far as I've seen).
Disclaimer: I'm single, so I'm not arguing for these benefits. That's just what I always thought the reason was.
> Married couples get tax benefits as an incentive to get married and have kids.
Married couples in the US most get tax benefits to the extent to which they have a significant imbalance in income, and it seems to be a lot more connected to the idea of traditional division of labor (one partner working in the trade economy while the other provides in-home support for that partner) than children, per se.
They are tax benefits that directly subsidize children, but they aren't conditioned on marriage.
> I find it weird that this argument has so far been completely ignored by either side in the pro/anti-gay marriage discussion (at least as far as I've seen).
The idea that the civil benefits of marriage are inherently tied to the purpose of promoting reproduction are rather central arguments in the anti-same-sex-marriage camp; this was, in fact, the main argument for Prop. 8's constitutionality offered by its proponents.
> The idea that the civil benefits of marriage are inherently tied to the purpose of promoting reproduction are rather central arguments in the anti-same-sex-marriage camp; this was, in fact, the main argument for Prop. 8's constitutionality offered by its proponents.
My apologies then, I haven't followed the gay marriage discussion in general, only the discussion about Brendan Eich.
Not to mention that you get special consideration / tax treatment from the federal government if you have kids regardless of marital status. For example you don't have to be married to claim children as dependents. The marriage [benefits are for children]/children angle is wrong therefore wrong in two respects.
Exactly! My cousins are raising 3 foster kids (now adopted) and their taxes reflect that. So definitely the civil union thing can handle that.
The injustice is simply in the sit-in-the-back-of-the-bus thing - that a lesbian couple should be stamped 'civil union' just so everybody knows they're not as good. Its Jim Crow all over again.
We have a lot of shortages in this world, but human beings aren't one of them. Any incentive for procreating is, at best, antiquated and, at worst, contributing to the overpopulation of the planet.
That's true in the 21st century, but it wasn't true for most of humanity's history. In addition, there was always a population-level competition between countries (you out-breed the other guys, then conquer them by brute force). I'm not sure whether in the age of jet fighters, strike drones and nukes this competition makes sense anymore.
Even if this were true (which it isn't), the slippery slope argument most definitely applies here. Are you going to reject the veneration of our founding fathers because they held slaves? What if a company has middle managers who are against same sex marriage, or engineers? Do we boycott them as well? You are advocating for intellectual puritanism in the name of protection of diversity -- an utterly incoherent position.
Also, we're talking about political speech from many years ago, for a cause that the majority of Californians passed -- and, lest we forget, President Obama, liberal hero he is, did not support gay marriage until 2012. Many, many religious conservatives (hundreds of millions of them, in fact) would argue against your conflation of anti-gay marriage with anti-gay. And just because you seem unable to fathom dissenting views on this issue doesn't mean they don't exist.
"anti-gay" is an oversimplification. Eich gave money to a campaign opposing the legalization of same sex marriage. That's a far cry from anti-gay. He may very well be anti-gay, whatever it is that means, but this particular donation does not equate to that sentiment.
Look, I'm as much for gay rights as the next dude, but what kind of world are you trying to create by cornering people who hold opinions different than yours? Not cool.
Reading your comment, the word 'witch hunt' comes to mind. Just because they wronged you doesn't mean you wrong them too.
Not so sure about "what kind of world", but these sorts of things, including the infinite extension of "the personal is the political", are setting up the conditions for our cold civil war to get hot. Which will be much worst than things currently are, and will lead a "kind of world" that history tells us will almost certainly be worse than what we had before.
There is a vast difference between feeling strongly about an individual who feels strongly against folks who are gay, and judging anyone and everyone based upon their political views.
The latter comes from a lack of empathy. One sees the label and stops seeing the person. That lack of empathy is exactly what drives hatred and bigotry.
I'm not saying doing so is hypocritical. For conflicts like this to come to an end, all parties need to connect to individuals rather than knee-jerk reacting.
Then why does that not follow to followers of Christianity or Judaism for instance, given that both religions do not tolerate homosexuality? Should we get rid of those people in the workplace as well?
Religions change over time. Traditional Judaism and early Christianity both allowed slavery and had laws governing it. Today they completely abhor the notion of slavery. The current pope is backing off on Catholicism's stance on homosexuality.
There are different kinds of slavery. Nearly all systems throughout history treated slaves better than American slavery did. Slavery in the law given to Israel back then was not racist, it was not usually permanent (all slaves were freed every 7 years unless they chose to stay), and the slaves still had some rights and protections. So even someone who supported that kind of slavery could still be against American-style slavery.
I don't know about Judaism, but homosexuality is not something that is explicity banned in Christianity. Yeah there are some bible passages against it, but there are also bible passages condoning slavery, polygamy, forced marriage etc. If one were to be a strict adherent to the bible one would have to take some far-out stances on some issues.
Truth is that just because there are some parts of a religion that may support discrimination or other negative behavior, doesn't mean followers of that religion have to agree with that. Many people ignore the parts they don't agree with.
> Then why does that not follow to followers of Christianity or Judaism for instance, given that both religions do not tolerate homosexuality?
"Christianity" and "Judaism" are not monolithic institutions and substantial subsets of both tolerate (or actually accept, which isn't the same thing) homosexuality.
Religions do not tolerate or not-tolerate. Religions are social constructs that only appear to make choices, often when it is convenient for individuals. Individuals tolerate or not tolerate. There are plenty of devout, gay Christians and Jews. They might have a hard time with their faith and their community, but they are there.
The responsibility is on the individual; saying that "my religions says otherwise" is not impeccable.
I don't think you realize that there are (quite a few) people in the country who think being pro-gay-marriage is absolutely unacceptable.
Until nearly 100% of the population accepts it as a basic and obvious axiom, it does not even remotely have the same status as being pro-slavery or denying suffrage to women.
There's a lot of people who realize that being anti-marriage-equality today is similar to being pro-slavery shortly after the Civil War when there was nowhere near 100% recognition of how abhorrent slavery is/was, though not in severity (i.e. both are morally wrong, but the magnitude of slavery is much, much greater...if pro-equality advocates were more intellectually honest, they'd equate it with prohibitions on interracial marriage which, though a vestige of slavery, is more of an exact corollary).
But it's pretty clear to those of us who have no dog in this fight that the anti-equality folks are on the wrong side of history. In 50 years, not allowing gays to marry will be more or less equivalent to the prohibitions against interracial marriage that once existed and are now, almost universally, recognized as being bigoted.
Go to any of the thousands of rural communities in the United States, especially in the midwest, and you will find many people who will strongly stand by their opinion that gay marriage should not be legal.
Just because you believe that gay rights are as fundamental as women's suffrage does not mean that, as a political issue, gay rights are as decided nationwide as women's suffrage.
Women's suffrage, many, many years ago, would have been in the same boat that gay rights are now. Go back many years before that, and slavery would be similarly as controversial. Do you not understand that?
Saying that gay rights aren't as fundamental of an issue because it's not as cut and dry today as women's suffrage and slavery are today is patently ridiculous. Those issues have had decades to pass from controversial to relatively settled to settled.
> Saying that gay rights aren't as fundamental of an issue because it's not as cut and dry today as women's suffrage and slavery are today is patently ridiculous.
"Just because you believe that gay rights are as fundamental as women's suffrage does not mean that, as a political issue, gay rights are as decided nationwide as women's suffrage."
That's exactly what that part of your sentence says, unless I am reading this incorrectly.
I think you're reading it incorrectly. You're interpreting it backwards from what I intended.
X = "you believe that gay rights are as fundamental as women's suffrage"
Y = "gay rights are as decided nationwide as women's suffrage"
All I wrote is that X does not imply Y. You seen to be interpreting it, though, as (not Y) implies (not X), the contrapositive of which is X does imply Y, which is basically the opposite of what I meant.
It absolutely does have the same status for those who are on the right side of the argument (the one that will certainly be vindicated by history). The people who are in the right don't have to wait until the slow people catch up, in order to be right.
My comment was in regard to the present-day political status of the issue. With that in mind...
> for those who are on the right side of the argument
In the US, women's suffrage and slavery do not ever need to be qualified by phrases like this. So really, the very way in which you had to phrase that sentence invalidates the point you're trying to make.
> (the one that will certainly be vindicated by history)
The most likely future political status of the issue is not the same as the present-day political status.
> The people who are in the right don't have to wait until the slow people catch up, in order to be right.
You do have to wait in order for it to be law. That's democracy.
It is an opinion, what else could it be? You think it is wrong, but I also think many other prevalent mainstream opinions are wrong and injurious to my rights - such as banning me under the threat of imprisonment (or being shot by the warrior police, if I'm unlucky) to own certain chemicals, or certain tools of self-defense, or even certain information, or engage in certain voluntary transactions without prior state approval. You may say it's for my own and for society's benefit to restrict my rights, and everybody comes out ahead with it. But that's exactly what the other guys say too - everybody would be ahead and society would benefit greatly if only gay marriage were not allowed. You say holding such views is despicable and non-acceptable to the point that if you use browser which is made by a company whose executive holds such views you are tainted by it. Then I ask why you're not tainted by having people supporting even harsher infringements of liberties? Should we boycott everything that has relationship to people ever supporting gun control, war on drugs, rent control, zero tolerance policies, blasphemy bans, speech codes, etc.? Should we ban people known to have socialist sympathies (and this comes as close to actual slavery as it can get - socialist governments actually implemented forced labor many times and routinely strip people of their rights) from participating in our communities, for example? How far should we go with this?
Just in case, I agree with gay marriage, women suffrage and I’m against slavery. But I think that the people that disagree with my opinion have the right to have a different opinion. Are you sure that all your other opinions are also correct?
Let's not pretend that these people are donating money to the KKK or Focus on the Family. They are donating to major political candidates, with complex issue platforms of which gay marriage is almost certainly a small part. I don't see any names on here that could be considered "champions" of traditional marriage. Are you saying that every single person who donated anything to Mitt Romney or George W. Bush should be shunned and "reap what they sow?"
A lot of people believe that about every issue and on both sides. And we aren't talking about some small minority of bigots, it's the majority of the population. You can't just say it's not an issue in 2014 because it very much still is.
I agree with you. And frankly I am so appalled by the false equivalence offered by many 'liberals' on this issue. Rather than recognize that this freedom falls squarely within the preamble of the US Declaration of Independence, it is instead suggested by these people that it is a 'private' or 'religiously-motivated' 'belief' that therefore falls outside of critique, protest, or public protection (etc.). I'm sorry but this is simply not a moral case to make.
As I indicated before, I find it so appalling that you see such views espoused by the 'liberal' party of the US.
At the risk of being pedantic, the Declaration of Independence does not "grant" rights in the same manner that the Bill of Rights does, and really can't be used in the same context when attempting to make a Constitutional argument.
I didn't say that it "granted" anything. I said that in the US was founded on a specific idea of freedom. You're not being pedantic because what you say simply does not apply. Explain where I attempted to make a "Constitutional argument" - I didn't mention the Constitution a single time.
> this freedom falls squarely within the preamble of the US Declaration of Independence
whether accurate or not, doesn't matter, because of the DOI isn't any sort of binding document. It can say that every man, woman and child deserve their own puppy, but that's not going to make it any more or less likely to happen.
"Merely" - no; your comment was nothing less than a straw man argument. I didn't say "Constitutional" anywhere, nor did I imply it. I stated unequivocally that it goes against the values of freedom the US was founded on.
The DoI does not say "everyone deserves a puppy". Give me a break and please take your straw man argument elsewhere.
Many of us view being homosexual just as absolutely unacceptable as being pro-choice or denying husbands the right to beat their wives. It's not simply a "moral view" in 2014. It's not an opinion. It's flat out wrong and supporters of that unnatural way of life reap what they sow.
"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
Not sure if you are being a troll. Do you think it's unacceptable to deny people the right to beat their spouses or do you not understand how double negative works?
