> I have trouble thinking these people who hold views I find quite wrong are bad people
Even when we are talking about people who support stomping on the rights of others because of something as private as sexual orientation?
Even when we are talking about people who support stomping on the rights of others because of something as private as sexual orientation?
Are all of these people "bad"? Of course not. There is simply a cultural disconnect, and some ideas die hard.
(1) http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-hom...
In that one respect, yes.
> There is simply a cultural disconnect
Yes, much like there was once a “cultural disconnect” over whether human beings could legitimately be treated as property rather than persons.
You’re not the first person I’ve seen equate the plight and horror of slaves and slavery to the contemporary condition of the LGTB community in a modern, first world, secular society, but I can’t help but wonder at exactly how it is that you arrived at that conviction.
(2) If you mean something like “paints an equivalence between”, I didn't. I provided an illustration of the concept that the existence of a cultural difference does not imply equal validity of both sides of the difference.
(3) The attitudes rejecting homosexuality are almost entirely not found in secular society, though they may be found in national whose government is, nominally at least, secular.
2. you did, and your illustration provided no such thing; it’s a strawman with no bearing in reality, and your very self-same argument can be used to undermine your own position...
3. what?
There was a parallel drawn between the cultural divide on both issues, and the implication was that, like slavery, oppression of homosexuals is wrong.
3. The hatred of homosexuals (at least hatred of gay marriage) tends to draw from religion. A more secular society has no reason to care.
Why I would think what?
>Is the suggestion here that people who are morally sincere can't be bad (whatever their moral views may be)?
No, the suggestion is that morality and ethics are complex cognitive, spiritual, religious, and cultural structures that don't boil down to some silly binary regarding ones stance on one issue.
The point is, saying someone is "bad" on the basis of their view on any one single topic is ridiculous, especially when there is a wide range of opinion on the matter. It's essentialism at its absolute worst. The link I provided shows that 98% of Nigerians have negative views towards homosexuality - do you really think that 98% of Nigerians are bad people? Of course not - there are nuances to these issues.
My greater point is that what I'll call "liberal religiosity" - this idea that if you break in any way from the standard liberal dogma, you are cast as a heretic and judged a "bad" person, like all these supposedly "bad" people in the Midwest who probably go to church every Sunday, help their neighbors out, act decently towards one-another, etc.
>Or is it that you just don't view homophobia as a genuine moral failing?
I'm a live and let live kind of guy.
Yes, that does make them a bad person, and that makes it impossible for them to be more than just an acquaintance to me. And it also makes their religion--or at least their personal interpretation of it-- a bad religion. My imaginary friends don't get jealous of my real friends, and if yours ever do, you might want to consider pretending to break with them instead of turning on your real friends. It's up to you to determine if your imaginary friends have ever actually prevented you from making a real friend.
Ethical development has come a long way over the last 5000 years, but even the semitic monotheist religions have all had "That which is hateful to you, do not do to others," for the last 2000. And yet the faithful still put their own hateful words in the mouths of their gods or their prophets for the credulous to hear and repeat. They do it for money and for status, and care little for the consequences.
It is wrong. We can explain its wrongness with ethical treatise, and demonstrate the wrongness with game theory and Monte Carlo methods. Private behaviors of any sort are fundamentally unsuitable as discriminators in public life. To the extent that they leak, only that portion that is visible to the public should ever matter.
> And yet the faithful still put their own hateful words in the mouths of their gods or their prophets for the credulous to hear and repeat. They do it for money and for status, and care little for the consequences.
To be honest, that attitude doesn't sound any more enlightened or tolerant than the attitude of the person that was being described.
At least I know that about myself. I don't have to pretend to be a "good person", and can just be a "barely good enough person". I won't judge you if you don't judge me.
If you're my friend--and I do actually have some, shockingly enough--I won't turn my back on you because I don't think you measure up to my standards. It's more likely I'm just avoiding you because I don't think I can measure up to yours, and I'm ashamed and embarrassed of things I have said and done in the past. I can't even imagine how someone could cut someone else out of their life just for being homosexual and still know what friendship means. That person would definitely do exactly the same to me if they ever realized I was atheist, so we can't be friends, ever, even if they thought they wanted to be.
I just can't bring myself to tolerate the intolerable.
If you vote for a person who says they will ban it, then yeah that's actually taking action to deprive another person of their rights. I don't support that and consider it bad.
Thus if voting leads to somebody losing rights that they ought to have, there exists a problem with the larger community more than one bad actor.
There was a lot of uproar a few years back because Brendan Eich donated a relatively small amount of money to a anti-gay-marriage group, but what got me was that nobody he worked with had any idea. It sounded like he treated everyone fairly regardless of orientation.
To me it speaks volumes (positively) about someone's character if they participate in the democratic process, but if their opinion doesn't win out, they're willing to accept it and live with it.
When California did it, they did it with a popular referendum.
As a 99.9% libertarian the idea of messing with other peoples sex lives is completely alien to me, but just because others are wrong doesn't make them bad people; I believe it is important to separate the people from their ideas.
None of us are perfect. We all have bad ideas sometimes. That means nobody can be an entirely good person.
But the converse is possible; we can separate the idea from the person. And when judging the merits of the idea, we certainly should.
Consider that if you separate all the ideas from a person, what is left? An empty shell of a body? Does it still have a person in it?
Okay, why were the Nazis evil then? Why weren't they good people who just had awful awful ideas?
Why is it wrong to judge people for the ideas they express and the actions they take?
For nazis may be bad people but for nazis other nazis are good people.
>Why is it wrong to judge people for the ideas they express and the actions they take?
If you must judge then judge by actions not by ideas.
If the problem is that nazis murder people then a "nazi ban" is not the right solution. The solution is to ban murder.