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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Hard to find a good source, but here's something: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2521/did-mahatma-ga...
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.
Democracy is not threatened in this debate -- however, consistency might not be on OkCupid’s side.
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%.
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.
All is not as it seems when you change the optics (edited, restored).
PS I liked the line about optics better.
Gay people: We'd like to get married.
Government: Okay, here you go.
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.
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.
All men are created equal, right?
Gay couples are disadvantaged at a federal level. Being able to vote doesn't change that.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wrote a long rant about this a while back: http://tommorris.org/posts/2555
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.
Easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys when you think in black and white, isn't it?
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.
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.
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.
That gay men and women weren't allowed to bring their partners into the country is another major one.
Edit: Thank you for the downvote whomever you were. Mission accomplished; you managed to hurt.
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.
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's not as severe as criminalizing being gay or even putting the death penalty on it, but it is definitely anti-gay.
P.S. I never meant to imply you were against gay marriage; was just pointing you to the most convincing argument.
> 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.
That's actually how gay marriage was introduced in the Netherlands, through something called a 'cohabitation-agreement.'
The principle of it is wrong, but opponents don’t connect the dots.
Why are gay citizens equal enough to have equal tax laws but not equal marriage laws?
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.
(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.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: I'm single, so I'm not arguing for these benefits. That's just what I always thought the reason was.
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.
My apologies then, I haven't followed the gay marriage discussion in general, only the discussion about Brendan Eich.
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.
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.
Reading your comment, the word 'witch hunt' comes to mind. Just because they wronged you doesn't mean you wrong them too.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
That is a bit ridiculous, you realize that, correct?
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.
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.
Age of an issue does not dictate importance.
That's really not what I wrote at all, though.
That's exactly what that part of your sentence says, unless I am reading this incorrectly.
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.
> 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’s interesting to read again http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html .
As I indicated before, I find it so appalling that you see such views espoused by the 'liberal' party of the US.
> 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.
The DoI does not say "everyone deserves a puppy". Give me a break and please take your straw man argument elsewhere.
- Sir Charles Napier
Unfortunately it didn't really turn out in this case...
We're currently in a transitional period as discrimination-against-people-based-on-sexual-orientation undergoes the same social transition that discrimination-against-people-based-on-skin-color underwent a few decades ago. When it's over, people won't think of it as a political thing anymore.
I've never been to Chic-fil-a because anything I purchase there is presumably having a portion donated to anti-gay legislation. I'm not comfortable with Orson Scott Card's activism (historically, though apparently he's reversed his position to more of a 'ehh, whatever') but I did purchase Shadow Complex. I've never used OKCupid, and if the company itself or major profit holders were donating large sums to anti-gay legislation, I would be comfortable personally boycotting them, as it were, but calling out individuals for their beliefs like this...I feel like it's going too far. As much as I support gay rights, I don't think being unable to get legally married is on the same level as human slavery or women's suffrage...
Because actual voting is essentially worthless now that our judicial elders have dictated that spending money is the same thing as speech. Money now buys elections, moreso than votes. So we're learning to vote with our dollars like the fat cats do.
I'm of the opinion that actions speak louder than words. The first time Eich tries to pull some shit, I'll change my mind. But until then, I'm willing to give him a fair shake