Quote:
Acceptance is turning on the tv, flipping channels and NEVER EVER seeing Bennie Hinn praying over letters and mailing out prayer clothes he prayed over on tv to those who send $19.95 so they can be saved. Acceptance is not having a murder count on the local news every night. Acceptance means Liberty University, Oral Roberts University, Bob Jones University are closed due to no enrollment.
Don't twist what I said. I never have said anything about eliminating religious marriage. It's not the same thing as civil marriage. I never said religion should be gone. I said I wanted the hate mongers gone. I said when religion does harm it should be held accountable. It never has been held accountable for mass murder and war. I am done talking about religion.
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Toughy:
I'm sorry but I have to beg to differ with you. The highlighted passage above does not say ANYTHING about holding religion accountable nor does it say anything about wanting the hate mongers gone. What you said is that WHEN Benny Hinn is no longer no TV--without any explanation as to why he is no longer on TV--then and only then can queer people be considered to have been accepted by society. You said that WHEN Oral Roberts and Liberty and Bob Jones are no longer able to stay open for lack of enrollment THEN and only then can queer people be considered to be accepted by society.
You did not qualify your comments nor did you explain what you meant so in the absence of your explaining how, precisely, we get rid of those universities or that preacher (or any like them) it is *entirely* reasonable to interpret the above to mean that religion--or at least the religion you disapprove of--has to go. I see Secret Agent Ma'am's interpretation as being a rather straightforward reading of your words in the absence of explanation or qualification. And given that, at present, approximately a third of the *species* practices some variant of Christianity that means it is likely to be around in some form for a very, very long time.
As far as the relative popularity of various positions here or elsewhere, so what? I keep going back to how do you get people who might not agree with your vision of how society *should* be to go along with it? Again, I do not necessarily disagree with you that perhaps government should get out of business of designating certain types of households as being significant. Perhaps that is the case but as Citybutch pointed out a couple of pages back, getting rid of marriage would undo hundreds of years of Western common law.
I don't think that we should overturn a legal tradition *simply* because someone thinks we should. There are reforms I would like to see but complete overhauls require a great deal of consideration because there are *always* unintended consequences. I am not, in fact, making an argument in favor of marriage as it is currently understood. I'm trying to understand how you expect to convince people to go along with your scheme.
I have yet to hear a particularly compelling argument, even a hypothetical argument, put forth as to how you convince people who may not share your particular political or religious world view to uproot and overhaul an entire social system. That may seem like being a wet blanket but as I've said a couple of times now, history is littered with the bodies of people who were broken on the altar of this or that utopian vision espoused by some group of people who said to the rest of society "Civilization. You're going it wrong." I've even gone so far as to stipulate that your vision of how human beings should organize themselves is the correct one so we don't get lost in the weeds but you've still to explain how you get buy-in from the rest of society.
Or is that just not a particularly important question and I think that it is because I am tied up in some old-fashioned idea about the consent of the majority to be governed counting for something.
Cheers
Aj