Ormus said:
I cannot expect everyone to understand what it is like to be gay. But I can never really understand what it is like to be black either. It doesn't mean that I support segregation until science conclusively tells me what it is like to be black.
At the very least, remember that you're dealing with real people here, not politics. Not a Bible verse. Not a psychiatric condition. By ignoring them, they do not go away. If you dehumanize your subject, you're going to end up saying a whole load of offensive and condescending things, even with the best and most innocent of intentions.
The best advice I can give you is to put yourself in the shoes of "the Other." Empathy is sorely lacking in today's world.
I'm not sure that equating race with homosexuality is fair, but it's great politics. You won't like this, but:
"Americans have shown that they will accept social evils on the grounds that those perpetrating the evils are "hurting only themselves." They will even allow their own self-interest to be harmed in order to protect the goods of fairness and equality. We have seen the success of the "I’m personally opposed, but—" strategy in our society.
A key part of getting Americans to partition their own convictions is the victimization dynamic. We don’t want to be victimizers, and we don’t want to be seen as victimizers. Our instincts are on the side of the downtrodden, and we cannot allow ourselves to be portrayed as oppressors. We cannot tolerate that as part of our self-image or our public image, and to avoid it we will partition our personal convictions.
We are now in a time when opponents of gay marriage are being depicted as prejudiced. This tendency will increase. Soon efforts will be made to portray opponents of the gay agenda as the contemporary equivalent of Klansmen and chauvinist pigs. Once that image of pro-family advocates can be sold to a sizeable enough chunk of the American public, the culture war over homosexuality will be over.
It will be a dark time for the Church as well. The Church’s influence in American society is considerably less than it was fifty years ago. It stood with the civil rights movement, retaining and perhaps even enhancing its influence.
Nobody wants to join or remain a member of "the Church of the Klansmen," and if advocates of homosexual marriage can sell the American public on the idea that faithful Christians are the modern equivalent of KKK bigots, then the Church will be in for hard times.
Homosexual marriage is impossible.
Over and over, pro-family debaters fail to make this point. They allow the question to be discussed of whether society should redefine marriage to include homosexual unions.
Society can’t enable men to marry men or women to marry women any more than we can enable men to turn into ducks or women to turn into geese. Denying people these abilities is not a matter of fairness or equal access. It is not a matter of discrimination or bigotry.
This can be seen by considering the nature of marriage.
It is obvious to all that sex is about reproduction. That’s what it’s for in animals, and that’s what it’s for in us. We may find it enjoyable, but from a biological perspective, that is motivation to get us to engage in it and thus reproduce our species.
The institution of marriage has been devalued in our culture, creating a wave of single-parent families, unwed mothers, economic hardships, abortions, divorces, juvenile delinquency, and misery for many. Devaluing marriage further by detaching the term from the reality of marriage and applying it to non-productive homosexual unions would only further these trends.
Putting matters in these terms brings the discussion back from abstract, sentimental considerations and reminds us of why we treat marriage differently in the first place."