Tuesday, August 3, 2010

stub: how can gay marriage possibly be a personal issue for straight people?

why do religious people in red states care so much about gay marriage if they themselves are not gay, and none of their friends/relatives are? you can make abstract claims about "societal damage", but i think thats kinda crap, since people only seem really to care about stuff that effects them personally, not abstractly.

clearly it is a personal issue, or else they would not have such strong feelings and devote time/money to it.

but how can something that has no effect on them be so personal

well, gay people are "living in sin".

"living in sin" means that these people EXIST in sin. not that their ACTIONS are sinful, but that merely by existing in a certain state (gay, cohabitating before marriage?), people are sinful. how pernicious of a mentality is that, by the way? merely the existence of a certain person is wrong, as opposed to their actual actions being wrong? thats actually really my main thought here; the immense horrid concept of "living in sin" and how people are thus sinners merely for existing.

but, anyway, by the same logic, we have "living in faith", or whatever you want to call the opposite. merely by following whatever your faith is, you are good and correct, and it doesnt matter what your actions are.

thus its a personal issue. if gay people arent evil sinners merely for being gay (and actually have to be judged on their actions), then faithful people arent good merely for being faithful. then they may have to be judged by their actions, and they may wind up coming up short. admitting that gay people have equal rights forces them into this admission.

...thats the best i have anyway. there's probably holes in my theory, so if you have some better explanation i'm all ears.

2 comments:

Margaret said...

I don't think that you can undervalue the extent to which some religious conservatives believe that diseases are punishment for moral turpitude. The assumption underwrites a lot of our legislation regarding persons living with diseases, most especially diseases that we blame people for contracting, like HIV/AIDS. In this mindset, persons with HIV/AIDS willfully remove themselves from the productive landscape of our society and become leeches on our resources.
On another note, if I condone homosexuality, won't Yahweh come and literally *wipe out our whole town*? I remember Sodom and Gomorrah. If marriage is allowed, they are going to molest and infect my children with HIV/AIDS, and then God will send the terrorists or a tsunami or Global warming to come kill us all. Oh wait, it can't be global warming because the scientists say that is happening, and if I believe that then it must mean evolution is true. That would mean that the Bible is wrong about Geology, therefore wrong about Ethics.

It's so logical!

Pat said...

this from the "agnostic".

as right as you may be about what i do and dont know, when you say "i dont know", they hear "you might be right", and then of course they take away "you're right".

saying "i think you're wrong" is a necessary step to get a naturalist worldview into the public discourse and hopefully legislature.