Breaking: Obama supports gay marriage

Time-traveling slave or sentient English-speaking cat.

 

This shouldn't be about whether you believe homosexuality is wrong - it should be about the rights of your fellow citizens whether you approve of those citizens or not. There are non-religious people who find homosexuality repellent and there are devout people who have no problem with it.

I really think Rev. Dr. Barber nails it:

 

Examples?

 

To take your argument a step further.....

Person A commits a crime and is not allowed the "right" to own a gun.

Person B, while no more or no less evil, isn't convicted and allowed the "right" to own a gun.

Why? Because Person B is somehow more responsible, more decent and less dangerous than Person A.

Says who? The majority? The government? The powers that be? Oh, OK, now we're back to original argument. So much for "equal rights".

 

A person committing a felony has caused harm or injury in some way. Homosexuality does not hurt you or affect your life in any way at all.

 

Anyone else feel like we're nearing Mark's Swayze-Keanu-end-of-Point-Break moment, here?

 

At the risk of being a contrarian whose sole purpose is to start fights, the 14th Amendment demands that when a group is discriminated against, the government have a rational basis to do so. There is a rational basis to discriminate against convicted felons - as a group, statistics would show that they are more likely to do harm with a gun, even if you could surely find an outlier non-felon who is more dangerous than a reformed felon.

On the other hand, anti-gay marriage activists have not been able to articulate a rational basis for why homosexuals should be discriminated against. At least that's what the 9th Circuit said.

There's your difference.

Again, though, I'm just being an out-of-the-way contrarian with no credibility here trying to start a fight, because that's "all" I do here.

 

Dick ... thanks for clarifying the point I was trying to make.

 

No problem. A lot like the 1st Amendment, I think that the 14th Amendment and equality is something that a lot of Americans don't grasp, although they could easily get the basics down in 10-15 minutes, if that. There are some nuances and contours, but it's definitely not rocket surgery. This is one case where I definitely blame the media, at least in part, for never covering these battles through that prism, even though that is how they get analyzed by lawyers and judges and decided.

 

Not necessarily. But you are free to believe as you wish.

The argument I hear most from anti-gay people, people who vote against these sort of measures (like the one in North Carolina) --- and I'm undecided on this myself --- is that when you pass something like this, it sort of gives tacit approval to that behavior.

Used to be having sexual relations with a person of either sex who was not one's spouse was considered shameful. Over time, it got to be where more and more somehow accepted it as the norm, that it was totally OK to sleep with anyone you pleased.

Ditto for drug and alcohol abuse. Used to be that sort of stuff was done in the closet as well. That's why they made it off limits to minors and made some drugs off limits to everyone. Now, we even use it as a mitigating factor for other crimes! "Well, he shouldn't get a stiff sentence because he was drunk/stoned at the time. Put him in rehab and cure his addiction. He's not really responsible for his behavior."

I don't want to live in a society where most people accept a homosexual lifestyle as normal or OK. There will always be people who choose that lifestyle --- even some who deny it's a choice -- just like there will always be those who choose to live a lifestyle of addiction or sexual immorality. But woe be to us if that becomes the norm or if we embrace it. Is that where these sort of laws are headed?

 

Some of this is just the advance of science.

In the 1400s, before Lincoln invented the Internet, people sent SportsJournalists.com posts via carrier pigeon freaking out about where society was headed now that a certain percentage believed that the earth orbits the sun.

Your statements against homosexuality and homosexual marriage are conclusory. You don't want to live in that society? Why not? What does it hurt?

 

Your entire worldview is ahistorical and silly.

There has never been a time in recorded human history without open drunkenness and fornication.