What are our objectives? Changing Bob's mind? Protecting the victims of Bob's bigotry? Making sure Bob doesn't misuse (if it is misuse, it won't always be) our platform / software project / mail list to spread those bigoted views?
Shaming Bob doesn't seem to be the most effective way of doing that. If anything, shaming and ostrasizing may just mKe his views stronger.
I guess shaming does let people know that we strongly think that Bob is weong amd that the targets of Bob's bigotry are welcome on our platform / project / mailing list. But then a little rainbow banner would do that too.
There are clear lines to draw around justice issues like violations of human rights, suffrage, freedom of speech, etc.
But you're painting with a very broad brush if you think it's morally correct to persecute people for believing in a different (or no or any) God. I would even call it closed minded.
And we can't call it coincidence that people of one culture mostly choose the same God. Gotta be learned, right? So I'm not buying that line at all.
And people always believe they have God down this time. Someone wouldn't say, "Yeah, I really had God figured out ten years ago but then I converted to East Southern Pentecostal Community Catholicism. That was a bad choice."
> That leaves, people choose God.
The way Christians look at it, God is revealed, not chosen. If you choose your own God, then your God tends to look suspiciously like an idealized version of yourself (or what you wish you were). In other words, to the extent you choose God, you probably have it wrong. That being said, you can't judge people for seeking earnestly.
> And we can't call it coincidence that people of one culture mostly choose the same God.
One culture? Which culture? We're talking about a Brazilian social network. Is that the same culture as the mountains of Kentucky or the streets of Rome?
To be clear, I'm arguing that people should be free to earnestly search for God (or confirm lack thereof) in their own way. Claiming people choose God presupposes He (or she or them) is already a mental construct.
The martyr complex is alive and quite well.
They are bullied and tormented by other people in the community and on social media, and it's accepted If it wasn't accepted, the people doing the bullying would lose their jobs. But I have never seen it happen.
I have seen people lose their jobs for disagreeing with the gay marriage ruling...and I'm not even talking about using pejoratives or using any sort of the same bullying tactics.
I would like a world with true equality. Not just equality for the few.
This sort of behavior is not progressive. It's regressive. It's a digital version of mob mentality and is the very reason we have a democratic process with a court system and a judge/jury.
Emotion clouds judgement, intelligence, and facts. The politicians know this and use it to their full advantage to get you to vote for them and create an us vs. them mentality.
Until we change this behavior, there will never be peace.
Your "not agree with" is hiding a lot. If someone is trying to make it illegal for one group to marry (and legal for another group) then how is that treating everyone equally?
Good thing saner minds have prevailed on the particular topic of gay marriage in the US. Also, I would love to see any hard evidence there is, that someone making lucid and noninflammatory arguments against legalizing civil gay marriages was actually fired from any job.
- He didn't have to open his mouth, since he had already opened his wallet. Money is a language of its own nature.
- Importantly, he wasn't fired because of what he did. He stepped down of his own accord.
- To say that there is wrong doing in Brendan Eich's case is to go full blown hypocrite: one cannot expect freedom from public backlash due to political donations. Especially when those political donations are ones that are restrictive and critical of the dignity and freedom of others. Yes, that he was forced to resign sucks...but admittedly, I can only muster a "too bad." Public people should expect public scrutiny.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
There was absolutely no reason to do this - you were going to win anyway. The divisiveness does nothing for national unity. People on HN easily forget that about half the country isn't happy about this, and those people are going to be around for a long time.
I don't actually think that everyone that opposes civil recognition of gay marriage is "hateful, bigoted, and evil." I merely think they are short-sighted and often eerily reminiscent of 1960s era pro-Jim Crow rhetoric. Re-read your post and think "black people" and "Jim Crow" and then come back to me about "national unity". No rights are being removed from those that oppose gay marriage... the only blow to "national unity" is one where gay marriage is disallowed.
Resist change all you want, but for the foreseeable future, the Overton window isn't moving back to a place where disallowing gay marriage is going to be palatable.
EDIT: There are some arguments where "the other side" might not be worth it's weight. Gay marriage and acceptance of equal rights for LGBT people is one of them. See "False Balance" and "Argument to Moderation" on Wikipedia.
[1] https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
There's no cog-dis in my position under my definitions, which do not match your definitions. I'm a founder of Mozilla, which for over a decade admitted everyone, up to (me) co-founder or (again: me, but then Andreas Gal) CTO, or VP, or Distinguished Engineer level, all from various creeds or beliefs or "axiom" backgrounds -- so long as they left their baggage out of their Mozilla work.
That changed in the last few years. Now the culture-war dissidents are staying quiet, and living on borrowed time. This is not a matter of contradictions being punished on a logical basis, since there is no contradiction given their choice of axioms. It's about winners burning losers' cultural camps to the ground. In two word, consequentialism; totalitarianism.
I would argue that the right to marry is not inherently a dyadic right. Before the latest law, certain people were categorically denied the sort of marriage they (as an individual) wanted because of a quality that they (as an individual) possessed and likely have no control over. Gay marriage changes nothing about the institution of marriage for any other person, and the administrative differences for the government are practically nil.
Accepting your definition of the "right to marry" as a "dyadic right", where do the basis for these sorts of rights come from, if not from the same source as the basis for "individual rights"? Where does the line between "all individuals are equal" and "these pairs of individuals cannot be considered the same as these other pairs of individuals" get drawn? How is the denial of marriage to an individual not a slight to the equality of that individual?
Lastly, I would venture to say that I am not a totalitarianist, nor a consequentialist. There is most definitely room for expression of contrasting opinions in the marketplace of ideas. I do apologize for the brashness above, but I fail to see what "culture" people like me are destroying when they are promoting equal application of rights. A culture whose identity is formed around restricting the abilities of others doesn't seem like much of a culture at all. (If it's being burned to the ground by criticism, it seems fair to say that that's a critical part of its identity.) To play the same sort of game that the polygamist argument relies on: these arguments sound an awful lot like the arguments for Jim Crow laws and against interracial marriage.
I wish you the best and apologies for any personal vitriol that my posts may seem to contain.
You assume dyadic marriage without stating the premise that justifies state regulation of dyads and prohibition of three or more. Self-expression is a nonsensical reason and in any case no grounds for state licensure. Plural marriage has been normative in certain times and places, and still is here and there.
When it comes to polygamy, you seem only too happy to restrict the asserted positive rights of others. I shall refrain from screeching "bigot!" or trying to get you fired.
Special-pleading from unstated and unjustified assumptions gets us nowhere. Post-Obergefell America must define the common good of marriage clearly to exclude or admit polygamy. I see no reason why, given self-expression and ersatz-dignity arguments used by the majority, three or more should be outlawed.
The alternative is to end state regulation of marriage, and deal with normal consequences such as offspring and estate succession (not to mention hospital and jail visitation, which should not have been yoked to marriage in the first place) via contract law.
(I'm not taking your anti-SSM=anti-miscegenation pattern matching bait - see Jonathan Rauch here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/24/opposing-ga... - and yes, I'm aware of Rauch's work in full, no need to cite his lame attempt to draw a line in the sand against polygamy. As for what camps might be burned to the ground: florists, bakers, colleges, the list grows - open your eyes.)
My "unstated and unjustified assumptions" amount to the current state of affairs in the West: governments regulate marriage, marriage regulation currently restricts this covenant to pairs, and there is a non-negligible amount of people that are being denied this covenant because of natural qualities that they (likely) cannot change. Point blank: is this discrimination? I don't care about what implications it has for plural marriage, I am talking strictly about SSM.
And, for all your talk about premises, justifications and strict logic, you're fantastically excluding the middle ground, jumping to "no regulation of marriage," thus ignoring reality to play consequentialist. The state regulates marriage at the moment, so let's operate within that ballpark, no? Maybe one day we can live in a "paradise" where contracts are the only things binding us to one another, but until that day...
If you can handwave away the pattern matching for interracial marriage, then it's no less fair to handwave away the polygamist argument.
How will the cultures of "florists, bakers, colleges" burn to the ground? What the hell does that have to do with gay marriage being legalized? We are obviously coming from a different set of beliefs... if I could "open my eyes" to see what horrors gay marriage will bring, we wouldn't being having this discussion.
You do realize this argument works against SSM, as well as against polygamy, right?
Being cagey or agnostic about the next step after SSM ("mmmaybe I do support polygamy, but one step at a time!") does not answer the question: why should the state regulate marriage, to what ends?
If your eyes are still closed, read @JVLast's piece (and no ad hominem arguments against him or TWS, which I do not endorse in general). He is not the only one to point out the shifting goal posts and bad-faith argumentation (in the style of Alinsky, or Marx).
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/you-will-be-assimilat...
Masha Gesson among many others is at least honest about what's going on in this multi-stage operation. I appreciate honest radicals. Just-so stories and assertions, not so much.
As for the question of "why dyadic?" but not poly... the complexities built into poly marriage are intrinsically different than one-one marriage. Our current legal system isn't ready to handle poly marriage, to bite the bullet that you've offered me. It is hard to separate out the impacts of polygamy from other cultural impacts, but some speculate that polygamy has some unique negative impacts on childrearing. [1]
I would still ask that my question from above be answered. Given our current frameworks and regulations, was the denial of the civil acknowledgement of SSM a form of discrimination?
My flippant attitude in past comments notwithstanding, I am terrified at the backlash that you continue to receive. Frankly, I didn't realize how all-pervasive it was, nor do I ever personally feel the need to get on Twitter to insult people (a la your link) or call for a third party's head (a la your personal story). Criticism and questioning for fitness of a particular role is one thing, but public evisceration is another. I can acknowledge and accept a opposing position whereby one seeks to abolish the civil institution of marriage altogether, for gay, straight, whatever, alike, which is what I'm coming to understand your position to be. But, I do find it hard to fathom how one can decide that "today's line" gets drawn before gay marriage, while also somehow respecting and acting fairly towards gay people in their day-to-day lives (which is where I thought your beliefs laid before this exchange). My sympathy ends there. Personally, I won't be one to crusade for the personal decimation that you seem to think I enjoy. I do believe that creating a culture whereby one is building up "pseudo-reasons" against gay marriage, like talking about looming bestiality and pedophilia, is as despicable as those that are using their sexuality to create misery for others. (Like the culturally vindictive lesbian woman in your article. By no means am I a prude: her path to children doesn't make me cringe, but her quote-on-quoted attitude does.)
Implicit self-righteousness regarding illumination aside, I break the TWS article into a couple of mish-mashes of fearmongering, mixed with some valid points about malicious intent amongst specific members of the SSM/LGBT movement:
- Statistics that attempt to minimize the weight that is, or should be, given to the "homosexual agenda," as this article would imply that there's such a coherent and unified front, by the mere fraction of LGQ people in the population. Civil rights are civil rights, no matter how great or small the magnitude.
- Statistics and quotes that attempt to criticize the way of life of LGQ people by implying that there is something wrong with less-than-monogamous relationships while married.
- Highlighting questionable behaviors and attitudes co-opted by people who also happen to be LGQ (people using impregnation as a tool of retribution are idiots regardless of orientation)
- Some really outright fearmongering about state interference in direct religious ceremonies. (Requiring that religiously affiliated employers give out birth control is pretty sane, thinking that somehow the state will turn to mandating that priests must marry gay people in a church/synagogue/etc. is not sane. What might be sane is to say that all marriage license clerks, regardless of religious affiliation, must adhere to the federal law. That's not a hindrance to whatever a particular religion's beliefs are.)
- Highlighting particular cases of activists that are pushing the cultural envelope for the definition of the "m-word". I don't understand the need for this here... the author doesn't exactly state why this person is doing a bad thing, but merely is preaching to a choir that must already think 3+ marriages are distasteful.
- The entire last page is one big "begging the question"...
The article doesn't answer what "culture" will explicitly be destroyed by the legalization of gay marriage. It speculates that cultural change may abound and be desired by the LGBT movement. The article is hypocritical in that it is seeking a "live-and-let-live" approach to be taken by LGBT supporters ("let the Catholic Charities adopt out to whomever they want"), while at the same time implying that LGBT people shouldn't be allowed to marry one another ("let two people get married if they want to get married"). There is bad faith on part of some of LGBT activists; some want far more than equality. Let's not kid ourselves though, bad faith on the part of some LGBT activists is no excuse for not working within the pre-existing legal and cultural frameworks that the West has, and striving for equality under those frameworks.
This is perhaps the biggest whopper of all: "Support for traditional marriage stems from many sources, including respect for natural law and the prudential concern that holding any line will become impossible once the core definition of marriage is tampered with." What is "traditional marriage"? What is "the core definition?" For this articles audience, presumably the "core definition" is that it's a man and a woman. These are the exact same arguments that you are criticizing me for, and they are a shift of the goal posts. How can one argue for the legalization of anything, if all one wants to do is point to this line that we supposedly must maintain? It's not fair to have to argue against a slippery slope.
[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1020925123016
Unlike what we have now where you are publicly shamed for your religious beliefs and the people doing the shaming not only deny it, but somehow think it's morally correct.