Which is advocating for not providing that right to same-sex indviduals. Which is anti-gay.
If the ballot measure said, "Only votes cast by a white person are valid or recognized in California", and someone donated money to support that measure - it would be reasonable to expect that they don't believe that non-white individuals should have the right to vote.
Suddenly being "gay" is cool and being "hetero" is not cool ?
Put another way - Tim Cook believes in God, which is fine, that's his prerogative. However, if he started donating money to anti-atheist groups, now he's actively working to disrespect the opinions of those who are atheists.
Note that this passage:
> Brendan never expressed that he was against gays or even hated gays. He was just against gay marriage.
Is basically identical to what many many people said about miscegenation/mixed-race marriage:
> (Brendan/whoever) never expressed that he/they were against blacks or even hated blacks. He was just against mixed-race marriages.
But in retrospect, it's really hard to look at that statement and not see it as an expression of bigotry. If you're "okay with gays" and "not okay with gay marriage", it really means that you're not okay with gays.
> Suddenly being "gay" is cool and being "hetero" is not cool ?
Seems weird to say that being gay is cool when we're arguing about people donating money to stop gay people from having the same rights as hetero people.
That's not true. You're stretching a line between two distant things in hopes of having a nice neat world of bigots on one side, and everyone else on the other. "You're either with us, or you're with the bigots".
That's an unreasonable ultimatum that I don't subscribe to.
I might be "okay with gays" but I might be "not okay with the annual mardi gras." It's a festival that closes down the streets and has stupid giant penises and vaginas on floats to represent the "gay community"? If I were gay I would distance myself from that crap.
In your world, I'm a bigot because I HATE that overly-camp, sledge-hammer decorative approach with men in g-strings running around in heels and pink fluffy decorations everywhere and don't forget the awful gay dance music. That's what it is to be gay? I don't think so. The mardi gras (at least the one where I live) needs to die. But I can't say that because I'll be "anti-gay". I'm not anti-gay, I just hate the annual celebration of the "gay community" by erecting giant penises on floats and broadcasting it all on live TV.
Do you see the problem? Just because you see gay marriage as something only a bigot would oppose, doesn't mean you have the right to drag everyone else into that binary mindset.
I'm not, I assure you. Especially when your subsequent example is:
> In your world, I'm a bigot because I HATE that overly-camp, sledge-hammer decorative approach with men in g-strings running around in heels and pink fluffy decorations everywhere and don't forget the awful gay dance music. That's what it is to be gay? I don't think so. The mardi gras (at least the one where I live) needs to die. But I can't say that because I'll be "anti-gay". I'm not anti-gay, I just hate the annual celebration of the "gay community" by erecting giant penises on floats and broadcasting it all on live TV.
You're entitled to that belief. It doesn't (necessarily) make you a bigot. Lots of people hate annoying parades - I myself found myself trapped a few months back trying to get across 5th avenue while the gay pride parade was going on and was incredibly annoyed.
So there we go - we share a common ground of annoyance towards loud, over-the-top parades.
But I presume that if another group had a similar parade, you'd be equally annoyed - that it's not the fact that it's gay people having the parade, it's the fact the parade is loud, decadent, over the top, with awful dance music (and giant penises on floats).
That's what makes it different than the example I gave. Your example (annoying, over the top parades with penis floats) is more akin to people who are against marriage entirely - they don't want anyone to get married, gay, straight, black, white, whoever. That's a position I can respect, even if I don't agree with it, because it's at least equally applied.
Gay marriage, though, is a situation where you have one group of people having a bigger, broader set of rights than the other group of people. That's a bigoted view of the world - for some reason these people over here can get married, but these other people over here can't.
If we were to apply it to your example, if you were only annoyed at the mardi gras because there were gay people involved - if straight people, puerto ricans, professional basketball players, whoever, threw the exact same parade and you were fine with it, then you'd be bigoted.
I'm all about a level playing field. Either everyone gets to get married, or no one does. Either everyone gets to have a loud, annoying parade with giant penis floats, or no one should.
Your example just doesn't apply here. I'm not dividing the world into neat examples of bigots and not, because people can have a broad range of emotions about a wide variety of things. And certainly, you can dislike aspects of gay culture without being bigoted as long as you'd dislike those aspects if they were present in other cultures. But when you single out one specific group as having diminished rights compared to the others, that's some level of bigotry for sure.
If my position on gay marriage sits firmly atop my less than enthusiastic position of marriage in general, the burden of convincing any participant in the debate that my position is not fuelled by hate towards gays is not on me.
In other words, if you go into the debate primed with the objective of weeding out homophobic views by aligning anyone against gay marriage with homophobia, you've de-railed the debate before it's begun.
Many people don't care either way and are sick of the gay marriage debate taking up so much attention. It's not a pressing matter for the world in my opinion, and I don't sign petitions when hassled at the train station about it. I also don't sign petitions against gay marriage either, but I will enter a debate here online about it.
Some believe that "marriage" in and of itself doesn't need to be extended beyond heterosexual couples. When asked why, an increasing reason might be this collective foot-stomping campaign insisting that anything reserved for heterosexual couples must also be extended to gay couples or else there is some moral corruption happening. I don't believe there's a corruption of morality in reserving "marriage" to heterosexual couples. A substantial part of that position comes from my view on marriage in general - its origins, its contractual formula, its roots in the church, even the cost of marriage and the industry around marriage... It's not something built for 'expandability'... But anyway, thanks for replying, I'm sure the debate will continue.
This is the tricky thing about this debate. I don't equate such benefits with marriage. That's a detail for the country and state. I prefer to argue for equivalent or largely similar benefits for gay couples. That in my mind would be the more appropriate way to achieve equality.
The analogy I outlined was about having an opposing opinion on something that is "owned" by the gay community, such as mardi gras, and expressing that opinion without being labelled a bigot. That's all I was doing there. Society's current obsession with political correctness prevents opposing expression of views from attracting accusations of deeper animosity.
I find the racism debates equally stifling. I could list a lot of admirable qualities about Chinese people and their culture. But can I list things I don't like without being called racist? These days you end up accused of being the "I'm not racist but..." guy if you happen to mention anything that isn't tightly wrapped in political correctness, or bundled in skilful parody and comedic wit - which is out of reach for most of us. So we end up just sounding racist if we say we don't like X, Y or Z about this or that country or this or that community.