“Jesus wants me to hate you!”

This is Jeffrey:

First, we were created in Godd image. Second, God gave you free will to make your own choices and act on your own feelings. third, it is a feeling that you get that makes you like the same sex, therefore, it is not any different than a rapest who feels he has to rape women to be sexually fulfilled. Also the molester who gets off on touching little kids. It’s all acted out on feelings that you have. I have feelings that I feel strongly about, but it doesn’t make them right or ok. Also with the bible it talks about traditions and ideas that are created by man and laws set by man. You cannot take what man created and use it to conflict what God has said! We are all created for a purpose in life. Unfortunately being gay isn’t one of those purposes. I see a lot of desperation to twist and contort the bible. You cannot compare specific law of man in the bible with specific law of God in the bible. It specifically says in the bible that God looks down on homosexuality not eating shrimp!

This is David:

1. When law and public opinion give their endorsement to homosexual behavior, they implicitly condemn those who disapprove of such behavior, namely traditional Catholics, Protestants, and Jews.
2. The push for SSM is — at least de facto, if not deliberately — an attempt to destroy traditional Christianity.
3. The drive for SSM is but the latest stage of the sexual revolution, and at every one of that revolution’s earlier stages (casual fornication, unmarried cohabitation, out-of-wedlock childbirth, abortion), it has served to undermine marriage; why would any reasonable person imagine that this latest stage will be any different?
4. SSM is the reductio ad absurdum of marriage. If persons of the same sex can get married, doesn’t marriage then mean anything — and nothing?
5. Marriage was instituted for the begetting of children, something that two persons of the same sex cannot do
6. A growing child has a profound psychological need for a mother and father. Two mothers won’t do, and neither will two fathers.
7. The undermining of marriage has had disastrous consequences for millions of children who have grown up fatherless (and usually in poverty). These consequences, while bad among all racial groups, have been worst among African Americans — in some cases frustrating the movement toward socioeconomic parity between black and white.

David says, rather pathetically, that he thinks these arguments are good arguments, “but, in practice, I find that the arguments don’t persuade anyone who is not already convinced”. He asks, with extraordinary blindness “Why have many of us in the anti-SSM camp been unwilling to deploy the argument that homosexual behavior is immoral/unnatural?” I have no idea why he thinks this hasn’t been happening, but it’s possible that people who are opposed to equal civil rights for LGBT people haven’t been attacking in quite that way in David’s hearing as much as he’s used to, in the last few years, just because coming out as openly homophobic and bigoted is found to be counterproductive.

They’re bad arguments, and I told him so (of course he didn’t respond):

1. There’s a whole bunch of false assumptions in this one. First of all, yes: when the law and public opinion says that it’s okay to be gay, that you don’t deserve to be persecuted or denied civil rights or discriminated in employment because of your sexual orientation, then yes, people who argue that gay people SHOULD be persecuted, denied civil rights, and discriminated in employment, look bad. But : arguing for the persecution of, arguing for discrimination against gay people is not required by any of the Abrahamic religions. It’s just something that homophobic people do. To assert (as you do by this) that homophobia is central to Christianity and Judaism, is offensive to people who do not believe that hatred and inequality are at the center of those religions.

2. Only if you regard homophobia as central to traditional Christianity. See above.

3. It takes a real lack of logic to argue that so many people arguing so strongly that marriage is important to them, that this means “marriage will be destroyed”. For you to believe this suggests that to you, marriage is not really very important.

4. If marriage means nothing to you, don’t get married. But don’t deny marriage to people for whom marriage is important.

5. Civil marriage does not require that either partner should be fertile, let alone that they should be interfertile together. Nor have I ever seen anyone setting out to argue that women past the menopause aren’t entitled to legal marriage, nor that tubal ligation/vasectomy ought to mean that the person made sterile isn’t allowed to marry legally. So this argument always just says that the person making it is a complete hypocrite.

Further, it doesn’t deal with the point that many same-sex couples have children – why should those children be denied legally married parents? No one has ever been able to provide a decent explanation why the children of same-sex couples deserve to be legally discriminated against, not even those who argue that their Christianity mandates they harass and persecute lesbians and gays.

6. There’s no evidence for this at all; it’s just a wish from the university of It Stands To Reason. But even if it were true, see above; why are you arguing that children whom you claim to believe are being profoundly psychologically stunted, should also be legally discriminated against by being denied married parents?

7. So why are you arguing that some couples shouldn’t be allowed to get married, that marriage is meaningless? If you believe that children deserve married parents, why are you arguing that some children should be legally banned from having married parents? This too is the mark of a hypocrite.

8. One in four black men is in jail. The US locks people up for offenses that in other countries do not merit jail. Yet you waste your time denying marriage to some because you claim it’s central to your religion to discriminate against gay people – you want us to believe that you think at the day of judgement Jesus will divide the sheep and the goats not by their generosity and charity, but by who was most homophobic.

Really, all the arguments come down to this: There are Christians who assert that it is essential to their being Christian that they get to discriminate against same-sex couples. That if they’re not allowed to discriminate, they’re not being Christians – their faith is “destroyed”. (The religious exemption in the bill New York state passed last week allows only for religious organizations to refuse to help to solemnize a marriage, but does not create the loophole these Christians were asking for, to give them a legal right to set up an apartheid system in New York against same-sex married couples.) For them, the practice of homophobia is central to Christianity: they say explicitly, they argue as a reason against lifting the ban on same-sex marriage, that if they’re not allowed to discriminate, they don’t feel they’re really being Christians:

I dialogued with a Christian called Meagan who repeatedly insisted that in denying equality to LGBT people, in arguing that homosexuality was a special sin that deserved denial of civil rights to bring homosexuals to repentence, she was “following Christ’s teachings” – but she was unable to cite anything from the gospels to show where she’d got the idea Jesus wanted her to discriminate, only the classic set of three verses from Leviticus, Romans, and Corinthians (one of which urges her to stone gay men to death, the other two don’t actually say what she thinks they say…) Another Christian who kept bringing up bestiality and pedophilia with suspicious enthusiasm, told her I was “Catholic-phobic” and she retired satisfied that this explained my inability to accept her explanations.

But seriously. These Christians have tied their entire faith not to any of the traditional ideas about what Christianity is, but solely and very purely to the idea that they must oppose civil rights for LGBT people in order to be Christians, and if they can’t, David says, they’ll be destroyed.

Really?

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