Proposition 8 discussion continued

[MrsSpringsteen]

You know, that comment might be cute or funny if this weren't an incredibly hurtful issue for many people. Try empathy.

Empathy is saved for a select group, I guess

 

[Irishteen]

My favourite argument about gay marriage has to be that being gay is unnatural; it doesn't matter if it is or not look at the world we live in.

Such great natural things such as planes and cars; I mean we never do unnatural things do we?

I'd like it so much better if people actually came up with either decent arguments about it or just come out and say how bigoted they are. It'd be so much better than all the bad arguments like the unnatural one...

 

[diamond]

psst:

This view is not a doctrine of the Church and has never been practiced by the Church at any time.

This seems like some frightening ideasBlood atonement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The repudiation built on the idea that it should only be practiced in a theocracy is a mirror of Hizb ut Tahrir declaring that homosexuals and apostates should only be killed when true Islam dominates a society.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Can you say that religiously sanctioned capital punishment is always wrong?

 

[diamond]

yes.


Capital Punishment
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regards the question of whether and in what circumstances the state should impose capital punishment as a matter to be decided solely by the prescribed processes of civil law. We neither promote nor oppose capital punishment.

 

[anitram]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regards the question of whether and in what circumstances the state should impose capital punishment as a matter to be decided solely by the prescribed processes of civil law.

Since when is capital punishment part of civil law??

 

[A_Wanderer]

yes.


Capital Punishment
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regards the question of whether and in what circumstances the state should impose capital punishment as a matter to be decided solely by the prescribed processes of civil law. We neither promote nor oppose capital punishment.

You didn't answer my question, is it always wrong?

 

[martha]

You didn't answer my question,

Don't get your hopes up.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Silence can be incriminating, is religiously backed capital punishment always wrong?

 

[diamond]

what part of yes, didnt you understand?

 

[Irvine511]

My favourite argument about gay marriage has to be that being gay is unnatural; it doesn't matter if it is or not look at the world we live in.

here's what you say to that.

it is true that being gay is abnormal.

but so is being left-handed. so is having red hair.

being gay is a naturally occurring abnormality.

and if anyone tries to throw out the "nature vs. nurture" argument, all you have to say is that all sexual orientation is involuntary. it's likely a mix of nature and nurture, probably more nature, but the individual plays no role in who he/she is attracted to.

 

[Irvine511]

yes.


Capital Punishment
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regards the question of whether and in what circumstances the state should impose capital punishment as a matter to be decided solely by the prescribed processes of civil law. We neither promote nor oppose capital punishment.

i see.

so LDS only gets involved in politics and spends upwards of $30m when they're seeking to demean and rip apart couples who love each other, but not when it comes to putting criminals to death or not because of the whole "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's."

this really does sum it up for me.

why the obsession with sex? that's all it comes down to.

 

[yolland]

^ Families more than sex per se, I think. Although there are obvious links between the two (reproduction, sanctioned 'stages of life,' etc.). Most churches recognize that they don't really have much social and political clout anymore when it comes to things like the criminal justice system, but on matters that could be construed as 'family issues,' they do.

 

[Irvine511]

^ Families more than sex per se, I think. Although there are obvious links between the two (reproduction, sanctioned 'stages of life,' etc.). Most churches recognize that they don't really have much social and political clout anymore when it comes to things like the criminal justice system, but on matters that could be construed as 'family issues,' they do.

i still think it's about sex. "family" being a stand-in for s-e-x.

saying you are "pro-family" or whatever pretty much means that you think other people should only be having sex within the bounds of matrimony, and it's a way to make sure that the only kind of s-e-x being "promoted" is that which involves penises and vaginas, since those make more family.

 

[Irvine511]

a possible plan of action to consider:

I no longer recognize marriage. It’s a new thing I’m trying.

Turns out it’s fun.

Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend.

She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,”
“Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.”

The impact is obvious. I tried it on a man who has been in a relationship for years,

“How’s your longtime companion, Jill?”
“She’s my wife!”
“Yeah, well, my beliefs don’t recognize marriage.”

Fun. And instant, eyebrow-raising recognition. Suddenly the majority gets to feel what the minority feels. In a moment they feel what it’s like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another’s beliefs.

Just replace the words husband, wife, spouse, or fiancé with boyfriend, girlfriend, special friend, or longtime companion. There is a reason we needed stronger words for more serious relationships. We know it; now they can see it.

A marriage is a lot of things. Culturally, it’s a declaration to the community that two people are now a unit, and that unity should be respected. Legally, it’s a set of rights and responsibilities. And spiritually, it’s whatever your beliefs think it is.

That’s what’s so great about America. As a constitutionally secular nation, or at least in reality a vaguely pluralistic nation, we can all have our own spiritual take on what marriage is. What’s troublesome is when one group’s spiritual beliefs deny the cultural and legal rights of another.

But, back to the point. They say their beliefs don’t recognize my marriage, I say my beliefs don’t recognize theirs. Simple. It may seem petty, and obviously the legal part of the cultural/legal/spiritual trilogy is flip-floppy, but it may be the cultural part that really matters.

People get married to be recognized as a permanent couple. To be acknowledged by friends, family, and strangers as being off the market, in a relationship, totally hooked up, yikes… it’s impossible to say without saying ‘married.’ We wear rings to declare this!

So, we can take this away. We can refuse to recognize marriage in the cultural sense. It is totally within our rights, as Americans, to follow our beliefs and recognize or not recognize what we like.

I guess this is a call out to all Americans with beliefs similar to mine.

If you believe that all people should have equal rights, and if you believe that marriage is one of the greatest destinations of a relationship, then perhaps you believe that nobody should have marriage, until everybody does.

That’s what I believe.

 

[yolland]

a possible plan of action to consider:

That works well as an ironic comment on a deeply unjust situation, though it also risks being self-undercuttingly cynical IMO.

saying you are "pro-family" or whatever pretty much means that you think other people should only be having sex within the bounds of matrimony, and it's a way to make sure that the only kind of s-e-x being "promoted" is that which involves penises and vaginas, since those make more family.

I think the former ideal has pretty much declined to the point of being effectively lip service, at least as a broad generalization about American society. To say marriage is still the only socially and culturally sanctioned place to have sex is at best borderline true. But producing children outside marriage, while certainly tolerated, still generally tends to be frowned upon, not readily looked-the-other-way-from to anything like the degree that nonmarital sex is (and in all likelihood, the problem of paternal irresponsibility probably has a lot to do with why marriage evolved in the first place). So, from the traditionalist's point of view, that necessitates encouraging men to aspire to be A Husband (And Father) and women to aspire to be A Wife (And Mother), so that those (relationally understood) roles remain sanctioned and there's an incentive to choose them, especially if you're going to have children. Marriage certainly doesn't have to be seen and lived through that prism to be a highly socially beneficial institution, nor for most married people to value that status deeply as an integral part of their personal and social identities...but, as we've seen, for many people it's so second-nature to conceive of it that way that they have a near-total mindblock against recognizing any other conception as worthy or legitimate.

 

[deep]

Calif. Supreme Court to take up gay marriage ban
Email this Story

Nov 19, 5:07 PM (ET)


SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - California's highest court has agreed to hear legal challenges to a new ban on gay marriage, but is refusing to allow gay couples to resume marrying until it rules.

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday accepted three lawsuits seeking to overturn Proposition 8. The amendment passed this month with 52 percent of the vote. The court did not elaborate on its decision.

All three cases claim the ban abridges the civil rights of a vulnerable minority group. They argue that voters alone did not have the authority to enact such a significant constitutional change.

This could be good news.


Proposition 14* passed with 65% of the voters and was overturned by the court.





* The people of California spoke in 1964,
The initiative proved to be overwhelmingly popular, and was passed by a 65% majority vote in the 1964 California elections.
The argument was that a person's home was their castle and the government had no right telling them to whom they could or could not sell their property

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was on The View Tuesday talking about same-sex marriage and declaring that gay rights are not civil rights because gays have not had violence inflicted upon them like blacks have.

Huckabee said: "People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that's not really the issue. I know you talked about it and I think you got into it a little bit early on. But when we're talking about a redefinition of an institution, that's different than individual civil rights. We're never going to convince each other...But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge."

YouTube - Huckabee: Gay Rights Movement Hasn't Met Violence Threshold

 

[onebloodonelife]

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was on The View Tuesday talking about same-sex marriage and declaring that gay rights are not civil rights because gays have not had violence inflicted upon them like blacks have.

Huckabee said: "People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that's not really the issue. I know you talked about it and I think you got into it a little bit early on. But when we're talking about a redefinition of an institution, that's different than individual civil rights. We're never going to convince each other...But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge."

YouTube - Huckabee: Gay Rights Movement Hasn't Met Violence Threshold

Did he really just say that? Apparently he hasn't seen or heard about the countless crimes against gay people...

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

I guess he just thinks there still aren't enough crimes against gay people-there is a threshold, after all. Arbitrarily determined by Mike.

 

[A_Wanderer]

what part of yes, didnt you understand?

I didn't understand the ambiguity, by not taking a stand your Church seems to think that capital punishment is an acceptable state of affairs, in the immortal words of Zapp Brannigan "I'm sickened by their neutrality".

The question of state sanctioned murder can be black and white, either it is wrong in all cases or it isn't.

If you were living under some sort of democratic theocracy and the state brought in capital punishment on religious grounds would it be right or wrong?

Deferring authority to the state on a moral issue is either weak and credulous or quite malicious, that could be a false dichotomy but you need to present reasons why.

 

[A_Wanderer]

here's what you say to that.

it is true that being gay is abnormal.

but so is being left-handed. so is having red hair.

being gay is a naturally occurring abnormality.

and if anyone tries to throw out the "nature vs. nurture" argument, all you have to say is that all sexual orientation is involuntary. it's likely a mix of nature and nurture, probably more nature, but the individual plays no role in who he/she is attracted to.

Even accepting that gays are predisposed to homosexual behaviour that doesn't mean that they should act on them, God can test people at times and homosexuality is another example of this, have you considered a career in the priesthood?

If someone resolutely believes that homosexuality is a choice show them why people should have freedom to choose.

 

[Irvine511]

Even accepting that gays are predisposed to homosexual behaviour that doesn't mean that they should act on them, God can test people at times and homosexuality is another example of this, have you considered a career in the priesthood?

do tell, what is Catholicistan like this time of year?

If someone resolutely believes that homosexuality is a choice show them why people should have freedom to choose.

it reminds me of a sign i saw over the weekend.

MORE GAY MARRIAGE = LESS GAY SEX

 

[diamond]

I didn't understand the ambiguity, by not taking a stand your Church seems to think that capital punishment is an acceptable state of affairs, in the immortal words of Zapp Brannigan "I'm sickened by their neutrality".

The question of state sanctioned murder can be black and white, either it is wrong in all cases or it isn't.

If you were living under some sort of democratic theocracy and the state brought in capital punishment on religious grounds would it be right or wrong?

Deferring authority to the state on a moral issue is either weak and credulous or quite malicious, that could be a false dichotomy but you need to present reasons why.

First off, I think we define "murder" differently.

Our Church teaches a concept of free agency, meaning although the Church may have beliefs and doctrines, the people in their respective countries, or locales are free to choose their own laws and govern themselves-seperate from the Church.

Only when Christ returns, and no one knows the day or time, but we do believe it will happen sometime in the future-will there be a govt. ran by God and not men.

Until that time, we're own our own to do the best we can.

Joseph Smith put it this way:

“I teach them correct principles and they govern themselves.”

Also one can refer to the 11th and 12th Articles of Faith:

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.

One may ask if they are LDS and oppose Capital punishment what are their options.

First many do, and they advocate against Capital Punishment thru legal channels.


If they can't change the law they move to a different state or country.

If they can't move and oppose the law of the land they persevere in their own way.



<>

 

[corianderstem]

 

[Irvine511]

on the whole "separate but equal" thing ... so i don't know if anyone was paying attention (i wasn't), but someone successfully sued eHarmony and i guess won, and now the company will also tempt you to spend $30 a month with false promises of undying love attempt to match up gay people just as they do straight people.

i always thought eHarmony was great to laugh at. their ads, the founder who was so obviously a James Dobson-type, and how it was heavily promoted to Christians, all those (non-gay, non-interracial) couples who could barely express how lucky they were, how it viewed marriage as the cure for what ails you, how it preyed upon a deeply human need and made you feel like crap if you didn't have it so better to spend that money now now now.

yes, they were a discriminatory website. yes, other websites effectively beat them up and probably got more memberships for doing so. yes, i enjoyed it.

but now, eHarmony will cater to gays.

and here is their website: Compatible Partners

and, to me, it actually reeks of *more* discrimination and contempt than before. it lays out what it is offering in no uncertain terms, and because it is a totally separate site from eHarmony -- where the stated goal is marriage -- and where it's goal is the damning-with-faint-praise, euphemistic "long term committed partnership" (kind of like a parent not wanting to say the word "gay" to their child so they refer to Mary as Diane's "roommate" or "life partner" or "friend").

it effective draws a line in the sand between gays and straights, says that one relationship is one thing, and the other relationship is something else and thusly not comparable, and is actually one giant step backwards.

way to go.

 

[yolland]

.

Modernity, Faith, And Marriage

by Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic, Nov. 20


Reading this piece by Rod Dreher is saddening to me. What separates Rod from many others on the right is his passionate sincerity. Even when he goes overboard, it's all real. He's not a cynic; and he grapples in ways many others on the social right do not with the fact of modernity, which makes the dream of cultural conservatives just that...a dream. And not of the future, but of the past. Rod longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women's role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.

To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently. Rod has read his Alasdair Macintyre. And--despairing (rightly) at the Catholic hierarchy's inability even to have a reasoned conversation about what is going on and at its own sexual and psychological dysfunction and sin--Rod has joined the Orthodox church, perhaps the deepest as well as oldest of all Christian communities. I respect all that--profoundly. My own wrestling with the conflicts between Thomist teleology and modernity came in my 20s, when Oakeshott and Montaigne threaded the needle and when the fact of my own sexual orientation forced me to a reckoning others can perhaps escape...My faith has been more private since and more informed by mystery, reticence and doubt. And watching fundamentalist Christianity and Benedict-style Catholicism react to the last couple of decades has only cofirmed for me what I suspected in my early adulthood: that their solutions to the modern problem are not solutions at all. They are wild lunges at something they hate almost as much as they misunderstand.

If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis with a telos guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces. Women will never return in their consciousness to the child-bearing subservience of the not-so-distant past. Gay people will never again internalize a sense of their own "objective disorder" to acquiesce to a civil regime where they are willingly second-class citizens. Straight men and women are never again going to avoid divorce to the degree our parents did. Nor are they going to have kids because contraception is illicit. The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require the kind of oppressive police state Rod would not want to live under.

But how do those who are ready to live in this modern world coexist with those who still believe that it is not only misguided but evil? And, of course, vice-versa? There is only one way. That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature. And that has a clear import for our current moment. The reason the marriage debate is so intense is because neither side seems able to accept that the word "marriage" requires a certain looseness of meaning if it is to remain as a universal, civil institution. This is not that new. Catholics, for example, accept the word marriage to describe civil marriages that are second marriages, even though their own faith teaches them that those marriages don't actually exist as such. But most Catholics are able to set theological beliefs to one side and accept a theological untruth as a civil fact. After all, a core, undebatable Catholic doctrine is that marriage is for life. Divorce is not the end of that marriage in the eyes of God. And yet Catholics can tolerate fellow citizens who are not Catholic calling their non-marriages marriages--because Catholics have already accepted a civil-religious distinction. They can wear both hats in the public square.

Rod believes that accepting my civil marriage as equal to his somehow erases the meaning of his own union. But it doesn't. He is free as a person of faith to regard my civil marriage as substantively void and his as substantively meaningful; he is simply required as a member of this disenchanted polis to accept my civil marriage as legally valid. That's all. Is that so hard? We can find a way forward to accommodate both our marriages in a public setting. I'm passionate, as every other defender of marriage equality that I know, in defending the rights of religious groups and churches to marry whosoever they want, according to whatever they believe, and to discriminate as religious groups in private contexts against those in their direct employ who violate those teachings. I defended the right to homophobia of both the Boy Scouts and the St Patrick's Day parade. Heck, I'm even against hate crime laws. I have nothing against the voluntary and peaceful activities of any religious group, and regard these organizations as some of the greatest strengths of America. The idea that gay people somehow want to persecute these churches, that we're out to get you, and hurt you and punish you is preposterous. The notion that there are rampaging mobs of gay people beating up on Christians is also unhinged. To take one flash-point between a radical Dominionist group deliberately trying to rub salt in the wounds of Castro Street bar patrons after closing hours--in which no one was hurt--as the harbinger of some kind of mass gay pogrom against Christians is daffy. To equate a few drunk gays with Bull Connor is deranged and offensive. There are elements on both sides who do not represent the core. That core can coexist with mutual respect in the context of legal and civil equality.

Sorry, Rod, but you and I have to live in the disenchanted world our generation was born into. The dreams of total pre-modern coherence--whether in the malign fantasies of the Taliban or the benign aspirations of theocons longing for the 1950s in the 21st century--are dreams undone by freedom. We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law. And we certainly cannot do so arbitrarily, to the sole detriment of only one group in society--homosexuals. Rod knows that restoring his definition of marriage would require above all restricting the rights and freedoms of heterosexuals in modern society. But he also knows that will never fly.

My advice to the theocons: by picking solely on homosexuals to force back the sexual and spiritual freedom of modernity, you look awful, you are losing the next generation and you are buttressing cruelty and pain. In your heart of hearts, you don't want to do that. So listen to your heart. Accept civil equality not as a defeat but as an opportunity: to persuade and evangelize for something beyond the civil that still respects the integrity of the civil. That's what America's founders intended. It is part of their genius that today's fundamentalists simply do not understand.

 

[Irvine511]

^ just read that.

on this issue, Andrew has moments of transcendence.

and the article he's referencing is worth a read: The Manners In Which We Live | Culture11

and if you want to see the video, the one that has the right wing just terrified for their own safety, the one of a few drunk people in the Castro yelling at a Christian group that goes there repeatedly to antagonize and provoke "save" gay people, you can watch that here:

YouTube - Chased out of the Castro District - 11-14-08

 

[melon]

My own wrestling with the conflicts between Thomist teleology and modernity came in my 20s

Interestingly, one could argue that Thomist philosophy was the "modernism" of the 13th century, inasmuch as St. Thomas Aquinas' philosophy was both vehemently condemned by the Christian establishment of its day and also liberally took inspiration from a series of unlikely, non-Christian sources for inspiration, most notably that of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy. It is probably not a stretch to say that Western philosophy and modernism could not have existed without Aquinas. In fact, James Joyce referred to Aquinas as second only to Aristotle amongst Western philosophers.

The problem comes less from Aquinas' logic and reasoning methods and more from the fact that there are those who take him completely literally, not understanding that he wrote from a highly limited 13th century perspective. There's perhaps much that can be said for his work on "natural law," and John Locke expounded on the relevance of it in his writings, thus formulating the idea of "inalienable rights" that the state cannot take away and the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--both, I'd argue, are highly relevant to the issues of gay rights and marriage. But to take the conclusions Aquinas came to on what natural law meant, considering that the 13th century understanding of what nature and science was pales in comparison to what we conclusively know now, is where the "theocons" have gone wrong, and we are right to criticize.

Where "modernists" like Andrew Sullivan and most liberals have gone wrong themselves is that they come away with the idea that "modern" struggles are so unique as to be without precedent and that past philosophy is of no value to the present. On the contrary, one would be surprised as to how much of the present can be addressed by pre-modern philosophy and how it is still a valid template for the beginnings of new philosophical movements still yet to come. Liberals need not fear pre-modern philosophy one bit.

 

[kafrun]

Did he really just say that? Apparently he hasn't seen or heard about the countless crimes against gay people...

That's a jaw-dropping comment alright. Matthew Sheppard, anyone?

Even accepting that gays are predisposed to homosexual behaviour that doesn't mean that they should act on them, God can test people at times and homosexuality is another example of this, have you considered a career in the priesthood?

Soo.. stop having sex with women and let us know how doable that is Especially if it's someone you love.

it reminds me of a sign i saw over the weekend.

MORE GAY MARRIAGE = LESS GAY SEX

Hah.

QFT..

Oops, I didn't respond to this thread with a Simpson's quote I fail at FYM.