Threading the needle on LGBT issues

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I went to a diner in Dallas, Texas a few yeas ago. As a joke, I pointed to the menu and ordered an LGBT. The waitress brought me a BTL with guacamole. No joke. I have to say. It was great.
 
I think it’s great you have such self-awareness of your tendency towards interpersonal extrinsicism.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
And please, don’t say I’m “comparing homosexuality to incest and pedophilia”. It’s quite clear that that is not what I am doing. I am saying that NO ONE can marry “whomever they wish to”, unless they happen to wish in accordance with the law.
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It’s true that you can’t marry whomever you wish to if it’s against the law. That’s why up until as recently as 1948, 30 out of 48 states had so-called “anti-miscegenation” laws on the books that banned marriages between black and white people. So, if you were a black person in any of those states who wanted to marry a white person, you were just out of luck. But just because something is against the law doesn’t mean that this is a just law and isn’t discriminatory.

That’s why in 1967 the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Loving vs Virginia that all anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. And that’s why in 2015 the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Obergefell vs Hodges that all laws banning same-sex marriages are unconstitutional because they violate the Constitution’s Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause.
 
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Thorolfr said:
That’s why in 1967 the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Loving vs Virginia that all anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. And that’s why in 2015 the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Obergefell vs Hodges that all laws banning same-sex marriages are unconstitutional because they violate the Constitution’s Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause.
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Well, sure, but the anti-miscegenation laws weren’t wrong because they were discriminatory – whatever the courts said. Who did they discriminate against? They treated everyone equally with the same awful medicine. They were bad laws because they forbade something that is good.

Those who argue for same-sex marriage ought to use THAT justification: that same-sex marriage a good thing. Talking about discrimination merely defers that issue, because IF forbidding same-sex marriage is discriminatory, then forbidding incest is also discriminatory.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
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Thorolfr:
That’s why in 1967 the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Loving vs Virginia that all anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. And that’s why in 2015 the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Obergefell vs Hodges that all laws banning same-sex marriages are unconstitutional because they violate the Constitution’s Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause.
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Well, sure, but the anti-miscegenation laws weren’t wrong because they were discriminatory – whatever the courts said. Who did they discriminate against? They treated everyone equally with the same awful medicine. They were bad laws because they forbade something that is good.

Those who argue for same-sex marriage ought to use THAT justification: that same-sex marriage a good thing. Talking about discrimination merely defers that issue, because IF forbidding same-sex marriage is discriminatory, then forbidding incest is also discriminatory.
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And before long, someone’s probably going to say, "Yeah, and if we allow gay marriage and incestuous marriage, what about people who want to marry children or some guy who wants to marry his cat? Or what about someone who wants to marry an inanimate object (a couple of years ago someone did file a federal lawsuit who said that he wanted to marry his laptop)? Well, if there are enough people out there who are into incest, pedophilia, bestiality, and objectophilia and they feel that they can convince a majority of Americans that they should have the right to marry, they’re free to try. But I highly doubt that they would succeed. That’s because most Americans recognize that there is a big difference between same-sex relationships and those that might involve children, animals and objects. In the first two cases, no informed consent is possible and the last example is just plain silly. And I think that incest is a line that most people in this country won’t be willing to cross.

Supreme Court rulings are not made in a vacuum. Most of the time, whenever the Supreme Court rules on social issues, it is rarely ahead of public opinion or if it is, it’s not too far ahead. So, by the time that the Supreme Court made its rulings in Loving vs Virginia and Obergefell vs Hodges, a majority of Americans already supported the right of their fellow citizens to enter into both interracial and same-sex marriages. According to a Gallup pole in 2015 when the Obergefell ruling was made, 60% of Americans supported giving same sex couples the right to marry. That included 37 percent of Republicans, 64 percent of independents, and 76 percent of Democrats.
 
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And I wanted to add an important point to my previous post. The Supreme Court ruling in 2015 allowing same-sex couples the right to marry did not come out of nowhere. It came after decades of hard work by LGBT people to convince their co-workers, their families, and their neighbors that certain basic rights should be extended to them.

When Proposition 22 which forbade the state of California from recognizing same-sex marriages was put on the ballot in 2000, I was one of thousands of LGBT people who went knocking door-to-door to try to convince our fellow citizens to vote against it. Although we failed to convince enough people to vote against Prop 22, that kind of person-to-person contact was still very important.

And yesterday, I went to see the movie Love, Simon which is a 17 year old boy’s coming out story. I couldn’t help thinking how much better things are for gay young people now than what they were 36 years ago when I came out at age 21. There were no movies or TV shows with positive and likeable gay characters with happy endings back then. Seeing a positive movie like Love, Simon would have made my own coming out process so much easier and less lonely. There was, of course, also no Internet where gay youth could find support from others like themselves. When I was coming out in 1982, I lived in an isolated, rural community and knew no other LGBT people there. It was a very lonely experience. And unlike today, there were almost no LGBT welcoming churches. The only book I could find in my local library that had anything in it about homosexuality was an old book on “abnormal psychology.”

But the fact that millions of gay people started coming out several decades ago and talked to their friends and families and neighbors and the fact that they organized politically has made things a lot better and a lot easier for young gay people today and it made the Supreme Court decision in 2015 possible.
 
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When I grew up my parents couldn’t tell pedophilia from homosexuality. Given that I had otherwise-very-proper SSA/gay friends and that there was a guy in an overcoat who’d sit next to young girls on the after-school bus and ”strangle his chicken” I thought my parents were wildly off the moral bulls eye.
 
So you convinced people to support sinful behavior.
Congratulations.
I guess.

As for the simon movie, again, yay.
So you supported yet another movie that supports teen sexual activity.
 
0Scarlett_nidiyilii said:
As for the simon movie, again, yay.
So you supported yet another movie that supports teen sexual activity.
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The movie Love, Simon doesn’t have any sex in it.

Mostly it has to do with a 17 year old’s struggle to come out and tell his family and his friends that he’s gay. I had to do the same thing 36 years ago, but it was a lot harder back then than what it is now. Yes, he does fall in love with another guy at his own school who has posted anonymously that he’s gay and is also struggling to come out, and the two of them exchange a number of emails, their true identities unknown to each other. They fall in love with each other sight unseen and it’s not until the very, very end, when they finally meet in person, that they exchange a kiss. But that’s as sexual as it gets.
 
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Fair enough–you caught me red handed in the act of sarcasm.
Look, LGBT covers a large umbrella of issues, and as I said upthread, there have been hurt feelings on both sides.
And I know this is the internet, where everybody can show up to participate.
But I was taken aback that somebody would show up on a Catholic forum boasting about participating in yet another attack on marriage and the family.
Which again, is on me, because this is the Internet.
 
I’m not boasting as much as I’m trying to explain why the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell vs Hodges came about and why this is unlikely to happen for all the other scary marriage scenarios involving incest and pedophilia and bestiality that inevitably get brought up.

Face it, we live in a democracy with many different points of view, and that’s even true among Christians. The local Lutheran and Episcopal Churches where I live perform same-sex marriages. it’s better that we talk to each other than put our fingers in our ears. And things would get kind of dull here in CAF if everyone agreed with each other. It would become a bit of an echo chamber and you’d fall out of practice in honing your skills to “defend the faith.”
 
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You described it as an attack. For it to be an attack it would need to have some kind of effect on the supposed “target”. I’ve yet the see anyone make that case.
 
The florist and baker SSM cases.

The schools going behind parents’ backs to teach gender issues.

Both impinging on other people’s rights.
 
I didn’t recall @Thorolfr mentioning forcing any bakers or florists to do anything, or being involved with a school. Those issues may be tangentially related but they are separate issues. How much a private business that serves the public is allowed to discriminate it a conversation we’re clearly going to have to have as a culture. You’re going to get heated opinions because it’s reminiscient of the days of ‘no irish need apply’ and whites-only establishments. It’s still a separate issue, as much as I support the right for gay people to marry, or more accurately support the idea that the rest of us have no right to tell them they can’t at least in a secular marriage, my opinion on the legal cases you mention are a lot more mixed.

That aside you described the other poster’s efforts to support secular gay marriage rights as an attack which is what I was asking about.
 
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