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Originally Posted by JKDS
No, it is cut and dry. There is no harm, period.
You can't know this. An example I raised involved how it is possible that policies that focus on family production are greater societal goods than policies that do not. I don't have a position on this one, but it is just one example of potential unintended consequences that some have raised that make the issue not cut and dried. Today, the courts may overstep its bounds in support of one group, yet tomorrow it may use that precedent to overstep its bounds in antagonism of that group.
The family idea behind marriage has been debunked countless times and isn't worth discussing. The short answer is bullshit, because old infertile men can marry, there has never been a babies requirement for marriage, and no state has ever suggested this be the case. Christianity ideas (which don't actually have a biblical basis in this case) don't enter the picture. The argument is a cop out, because "it's tradition, so fuck em" didn't work.
I don't disagree that it's a logical cop-out on their part.
The gay cake thing. That's about discrimination laws and is not exclusive to gays or their ability to marry. The same result would occur if they refused a black couple based on religious liberty. This isn't a result of gay marriage, or being "pro gay rights", it's about civil rights and discrimination which is a whole beast of another topic. You can't so much as touch another coworker without potentially getting in some shit, and God forbid a call center be found to be engaging in a practice with a disparate impact on minorities.
Yet it is an example of religious rights being neglected. Civil rights are too often a problematic re-imagining of the intent of constitutional rights. Spoon and Ong are both correct when they say that discrimination on racial grounds should be legal. Our judicial system got away from constitutional traditions when it started regulating discriminatory interactions between private entities. An irony of it is that the pressure that pushed the desire for civil rights forward was due to wrongful treatment of blacks by government agency, yet the "fix" largely involved dismantling of constitutional principles instead of sticking to the long-standing principles of prohibiting government to deny civil liberties and limiting government in the private sphere.
Your third point. The real world does not have safe spaces. This is the information age, and if you engage in an unpopular practice you are going to be ridiculed for it. Again, this is regardless of the issue. Whether it be about cop shootings, the uber med student, or high school students wearing the n-word, that shit comes out.
It is more than that. It is important for an oppressed group to, when they have power, to not turn around and engage in the same type of oppression that was against them.
Fourth, the scotus sometimes needs to step in to be the voice of the minority. Regardless of how it happened though, there is no harm.
SCOTUS's duty is to uphold the Constitution. It should not "step in for the minority" if doing so would be unconstitutional. The issue here is that SCOTUS has a storied history of re-imagining the Constitution in ways that are pretty neglectful of the constitutional principles.
What do you mean "regardless of how it happened, there is no harm."? I can think of a whole lot of ways to "help gays" that would be super harmful for everybody, including gays.
No one is forced to marry anyone. No one is forced to attend their service. No one is forced to suck anyone's dick. This whole thing was about a completely legal process and the ability to get what legally results from that process. Comm unity property in divorce, beneficiary status, tax breaks, seeing loved ones in hospitals, being able to adopt a kid...and have both people be considered his parent. Yes there is a ceremony thing to it as well, but that is not exclusively christian!!! You cannot tell me that Christian white weddings are holy while ignoring the "Vegas wedding". You cannot say religion is the primary motivation for marriage when divorce is more than 50%.
There is a lot of special treatment in marriage. I disagree with it all. However, this view still doesn't give regard to the objections to gay marriage. Antagonists view gay marriage as itself special treatment; albeit not necessarily legal special treatment, which is a big element of where the antagonists go wrong. To most antagonists, marriage isn't at its core a law thing; it's the family production thing as earlier addressed. They're mostly open to the legal benefits given to gay couples, but they cling to the concept of marriage as something else and integral to the health of society. It's not like they should be able to prevent other people from having different views, but I make this point to show that the narrative has been off.
Also sometimes we're talking about different things. I've been mostly referring to how the antagonists themselves view marriage, and you're referring to how the society at whole views marriage.
A lot of this comes from a different fact. It's one that many have forgotten, because it predated the above arguments. This issue didn't start out with "protect sanctity of marriage" and "gotta procreate". It started with name calling. It started with jail, with homelessness, with being victimized again and again. Then when we started gaining ground, that's when these arguments started up. Its when "screw fags" became "but tradition". You never heard about things like "marriage is about procreation" or "what will the Christians think" before this time. The fact of the matter is that we were fighting against bad people. Muslims got married, jews got married, fuck in some states people married their cousins. Why does it suddenly matter now, at this time, what was "christian" or not? When was consistency with Christian belief ever a pillar of marriage in america...where religion was not a prerequisite before?
I've been misusing "Christian" by equating it to those who are antagonistic to gay marriage, often on religious grounds. It's shorthand, it's hard to be exact. I've been trying to avoid saying "traditional marriage" since I don't like euphemism that inherently antagonize the opposing side. But maybe I'll use it now.
The reason this issue appears to have come out of nowhere is, well, because it did. Many proponents of the elements involved in "traditional marriage" have always been pushing that stuff, but it wasn't news because it was regular. Then when the gay element whizzed in like a bullet, it was an obvious affront to the concepts behind why marriage is considered important by that crowd. This issue is a collision of two worlds: the one where marriage is believed to be for the purpose of procreation and the other where marriage is believed to be for the purpose of love. Both sides fought for what they considered normalcy. Gays wanting to be normal by being allowed to marry for love and antagonists thinking "marrying for love" is already too far down the wrong direction in the first place. The legal stuff is additional mess that is involved in marriage because that's what happens when governments are involved in private matters.
What about the religious freedom of gays? Where is respect for their freedom when their interpretation of a religious marriage permits gay marriage?
You make a fantastic argument for why it is wrong for the government to be involved. The less it limits its involvement, the more it favors one group over another.
If the government stepped out of the business of marriage contracts entirely, and if peoples' marriages were between them and their chosen marriage firms, we would have seen the antagonism to gay marriage cut to a fraction. There would still be homophobes and Crusaders, but they're a small minority. My read on the matter is that most antagonists to gay marriage are afraid of the government forcing private interactions down their throats. This is seen in how the times of the biggest outcry of the antagonists to gay marriage have involved when a like-minded person gets coerced or mistreated.
Few things scare some fundamentalist Christians more than being forced to engage in anything supporting homosexuality. Like, they believe they could go to Hell or be punished by God for it on Earth and shit. To us, they're being ridiculous, but most people not understanding this has played a part in making it easier to subvert liberties. That's a problem.
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