Marriage and other LGBTQ Rights

[jyb]

Originally Posted by Brian-E

So am I.
One thing I'll say, though, is that I trust this man will be refused a visa if he ever tries to travel outside the USA.

Why? He'll probably get an engraved invitation from Putin.

[Brian-E]

Originally Posted by jyb

Why? He'll probably get an engraved invitation from Putin.

<shudder> Doesn't bear thinking about. He's worse than Scott Lively.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by chappy

http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/p...article/386322

I'm afraid to voice opinion here, even in the Soapbox, for fear of ban hammer.

I think the moderators would allow expression of more extreme opinions about non-mersenneforum public persons than they would allow about mersenneforum members.

Moderators?

Originally Posted by chappy

More on the above.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2..._to_death.html

(* sigh *)

Yeah, it would be in Oklahoma. Far-right fundamentalists have been prominent there for decades.

Oklahoma was the last part of what is now the United States to have a territorial government. Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska and Hawaii, though admitted to statehood after Oklahoma, each had a territorial government long before Oklahoma did. Its eastern half was used for decades in the 1800s as a place to forcibly "resettle" Native Americans, and the western half was popularly called "No Man's Land".)

This relative lack of governmental supervision (compared to any other U.S. state or territory) in the late 1800s and early 1900s was attractive to people who, for various reasons (e.g., 1. "different" believers who had been persecuted elsewhere, 2. blacks, 3. outlaws), were antipathetic to typical U.S./state/local government. They were established residents at 1907 statehood, and Oklahoma has harbored such groups for over a century. There was a KKK building in downtown Tulsa into the 1920s with its large, high "K K K" sign facing the direction of the "black" part of town.

When I was growing up there in the 1950s and '60s, there were always religious fundamentalists around -- only a minority of all religious people, but more powerful, numerous and influential than fundamentalists in many other parts of the U.S. I read of incidents where cars sporting bumper stickers that could be termed "anti-Christian", or perhaps merely supportive of non-Christian religion, had their tires slashed.

Nothing has happened to discourage fundamentalists from continuing to thrive in Oklahoma. Quite the opposite. They've always been quite vocal in advocating their beliefs and active in trying to impose those beliefs on others, and well-funded. Oklahoma is, of course, one of the three states that have rejected the new Common Core standards for education.

None of this is to say that there are no progressive people in Oklahoma, but they aren't the ones making headlines or usually prevailing at the polls.

[cheesehead]

Here is the actual text of the Arizona law: http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/51leg/2r/bills/sb1062s.pdf

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Though there's no reference to "gay" in the text, there's also no reference to either "skin" or "color". So, someone who has a sincerely-held religious belief that he must not serve customers who have dark skin is given protection by this bill. Do you consider that a desirable effect of this supposed "religious freedom" law?

How, exactly, would anyone be kept from using this law to claim protection from being punished for, or restrained from, any sort of discrimination whatsoever, so long as that person has a sincerely-held religious belief that such sort of discrimination is a requirement of his religion?

Should it be valid for any Arizona businessperson to claim this bill's protection of his refusal to serve black (or red or yellow or brown ...) people on the grounds that his sincerely-held religious beliefs (perhaps based on certain Old Testament passages) prohibit that? If not, why is the bill written in such a way as to allow that claim?

< snip >

I'm not the only one inspired to ask this sort of question:

"Right-Wing Activists: Yep, ‘Religious Freedom’ Protects Discrimination Against Jews"

Read how folks representing organizations that want to carve out religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws squirm and wriggle when asked questions along the same lines I asked, when they employ "willful ignorance":

(with my boldface emphasis in three paragraphs)

Originally Posted by Jay Michaelson

In two separate incidents, conservative activists have been unable to explain why their desired ability to discriminate against gays wouldn’t also apply to Jews. Then they finally admit it: there’s fundamentally no difference.

“I don’t think about—things I don’t think about.” So said William Jennings Bryan, the lawyer arguing against evolution, at the infamous Scopes “monkey trial.” The question was about Cain’s wife; the answer was about willful ignorance.

The same philosophy was on display this week in Congress, when Mat Staver of the U.S. Liberty Counsel—which, like its better-known cousin the Alliance Defending Freedom, works in courts and legislatures to carve out religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws—struggled to distinguish between a wedding photographer turning away gay customers and one turning away black or Jewish ones.

“I think that’s fundamentally different,” Staver said, when asked by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who is Jewish. Why? Because “she’s not saying ‘I don’t want to go to a wedding where there are people who are gay or lesbian.’ She’s saying she doesn’t want to photograph a celebration of same-sex unions.”

Ah, so as long as gay people marry people of the opposite sex, they’re perfectly welcome. Just not when they get gay-married.

Congressman Nadler didn’t buy it. He changed his hypothetical. “Well, what about a celebration of black unions? Suppose I don’t think black people should get married—that’s my religion. Is it an imposition on my religious freedom for the government to say I can’t discriminate?” In other words: not just black people getting married, but people getting black-married.

“I think it’s fundamentally different, and I don’t think that’s the issue in that case,” Staver said without explaining why.

Nadler, knowing he had him, said, “So suppose a photographer had a religious belief that she shouldn’t photograph a Jewish wedding?”

“I think it would be something she wouldn’t object to.”

But what if she did, Nadler pressed.

“She would have an issue there—a violation potential in that case.”

Bingo. What LGBT activists have been saying for years—that discrimination is discrimination—has finally been admitted. Protecting Jews from anti-Semitism is a “violation potential” of the anti-Semite’s religious freedom. The Liberty Counsel said Uncle.

The Nadler-Staver battle (Nadler 1, Staver 0) was eerily similar to a hilarious but little-reported exchange in Houston last month between City Councilwoman Ellen Cohen and the aptly-named Paster Betty Riggle of Grace Community Church.

Like Nadler, Cohen—who is also Jewish—substituted “Jewish” for “gay” and watched Riggle wriggle. The judge asked: “If somebody owns a store …. and I come in as a woman, or a senior, or a person of the Jewish faith … they have a right to refuse me business, is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t have any problem with that. That’s not the issue,” Riggle replied. As Cohen continued, Riggle said, “They have the right … to be able to refuse service that goes against their religious belief.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Cohen said. “So … they have a right to refuse me service.”

“Yes,” Riggle said quietly.

“So you’re saying ‘Yes,’ they do have the right to refuse me service as someone of the Jewish faith.” And here’s the best line, unedited:

“No. No, I’m not saying—Yes, I am saying that, but that is not the issue that we’re talking about.”

What both of these exchanges indicate is that, indeed, there is no difference between turning the gays away and turning the Jews, blacks, seniors, or women away. There are people with religious beliefs that disfavor all those groups. Just decades ago, Southerners argued that being able to keep their schools segregated was a matter of “religious freedom.” The only difference is that some discrimination is bad, but other discrimination is good.

Of course, religiously-motivated racial discrimination used to be “good,” right up through the 1980s. One of the most notorious desegregation cases, about the Heart of Atlanta Motel, centered around a restaranteur who said his religion forbade mixed-race seating. And the evangelical Bob Jones University went all the way to the Supreme Court to defend its religiously-grounded racist policies, as recently as the Reagan administration.

Now, of course, Staver, Riggle, and the like are shocked, shocked, that anyone might want to discriminate against blacks or Jews. (Although it’s interesting that Staver refused to fold when Nadler asked about African-Americans; perhaps a Jewish wedding, unlike a “black wedding,” is really a thing, and something that someone might object to supporting.)

Ironically, these real-life slippery slopes come right on the eve of a Supreme Court case, Hobby Lobby, that court-watchers expect will ratify exactly the kind of religiously-motivated discrimination that these exchanges are really about. There, the context is health insurance and contraception, not gays and weddings. But the same principle should hold: if you can opt out of some laws because they offend your religious freedom, why not opt out of others?

This, of course, is exactly the aim of the ‘religious liberty’ crowd. The ship may have sailed on African-Americans and Jews, but it is just leaving the harbor when it comes to LGBT people—and it is sinking fast when it comes to women’s healthcare. If people don’t have to obey the laws protecting women and gays, they aren’t really laws.

In the meantime, look forward to more squirms and wriggles like these. To be fair, Riggle and Staver are right about one thing: there probably aren’t as many overt racists and anti-Semites out there as there are homophobes and sexists. But then again, isn’t that the point?

[cheesehead]

And, of course, when one holds those kinds of beliefs, it affects ones advice to parents:

"Pastor Says Parents Should 'Alienate' Gay Kids, 'Turn Them Over To Satan'"

[kladner]

Thanks for both of the above posts, Richard, even if they did bump my blood pressure by 20-30.

[Brian-E]

Here's an "interesting" argument against opening marriage to same sex couples. The channel island of Jersey is under pressure to follow suit and open marriage now that England and Wales have already done so, with Scotland to follow shortly. The Jersey Evangelical Alliance has opined that the institution of marriage would be weakened if same sex couples were part of it, because:

Rather than extending the benefits of marriage to same-sex couples, redefining marriage would introduce the instabilities and infidelities commonly associated with homosexual relationships into society's understanding of marriage.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe...047496?SThisFB

[Zeta-Flux]

Ah, the argument from marital norms. Just one of a number of arguments which can be found at: http://www.discussingmarriage.org/

[Brian-E]

Originally Posted by Zeta-Flux

Ah, the argument from marital norms. Just one of a number of arguments which can be found at: http://www.discussingmarriage.org/

Thanks. I guess I can summarize the argument written there by the following:
If we change the definition of marriage, we might send the signal that people are free to form their relationships and families as their true nature leads them to do, instead of keeping things the way we think they ought to be.
Have I got it right?

[Zeta-Flux]

Originally Posted by Brian-E

Thanks. I guess I can summarize the argument written there by the following:
If we change the definition of marriage, we might send the signal that people are free to form their relationships and families as their true nature leads them to do, instead of keeping things the way we think they ought to be.
Have I got it right?

Not really.

From what I have gathered from your recent posts, your position is that it is (morally) wrong to deny the expression of someone's "true nature".

Their argument has nothing to do with what people morally ought or ought not to do. Rather, it has to do with encouraging social positives in a specific context. This includes encouraging permanence, exclusivity, and fidelity, all of which are social goods for the purposes of raising children. Lack of any of those traits are social negatives for raising children, regardless of any morality considerations.

So, I would change your summary to read:

If we change the definition of marriage, we send the signal that marriage is primarily about the individual--it is about people being free to form their relationships and families as their true nature leads them to do--thus losing its social purposes related to the rearing of children.

Or, as they summarized it:

Just as moral belief systems inform law, laws also inform and shape public conscience, and changes to social policy can have cascading effects in terms of what the public believes to be right and good about marriage. For example, the implementation of no-fault divorce has cultivated norms of divorce and serial marriages, with tremendous costs today.

Formalizing same-sex unions as marriage will make the revisionist view of marriage the explicit policy of the state, and this will further affect crucial marriage norms permanence, exclusivity, and fidelity. It signals to the public that fathers and mothers are interchangeable, and therefore ultimately expendable. This will affect the ways in which marriage partners live out those norms. We don’t have to disapprove of same-sex relationships to understand the costs of using marriage law as the vehicle for normalizing them.

[wblipp]

Originally Posted by Zeta-Flux

Rather, it has to do with encouraging social positives in a specific context.

Interesting. I have seen it argued that the extensive promiscuity in certain male homosexual communities (think gay bath houses) is a societal negative that can be partially mitigated through supporting homosexual marriage, providing societal support for stable long term relationship. I suppose that every change has its positives and negatives that must be weighed, and that proponents of particular views are often motivated to articulate only one side.