Principled bigotry is still, you know, bigotry

The working assumption is that homophobia, anti-gay bigotry, and hatred are obviously what’s motivating anyone who declines to provide a service for a gay wedding.

We all have working assumptions. We have to. The question is whether these working assumptions are correct, or plausibly based on the evidence. If CF has anything to say about this, other than that the “working assumption” is impolite, I’d be surprised.

This post raises many interesting issues. You’re surely right that the principle problem in Friedersdorf’s article is its failure to recognize that “bigotry derived from religious principles is still bigotry.”

But I think it’s also problematic in that it accepts at face value a questionable assumption in the language of anti-bigotry: that personal feelings and emotions are more important than actions, that, for example, to hate or fear someone is a more vicious form of bigotry than to political oppress them or actively constrain them. In truth, what matters most is not what we feel but what we do.

That’s a moralistic side of the language of anti-bigotry, an obsession with the ideological purity of our and others souls, that I think is not only false but harmful, since it invites people toward either a kind of guilt-free passive complicity (“Let the states decide whether to allow same-sex marriage, but I don’t personally have anything against it”), toward a guilt-free active complicity of the “love the sinner” variety (“I can’t be a bigot if I love you), or towards a total passivity (“as long as I have the right emotional states, I’m one of the good sides, even though I don’t do jack to actively further the cause”).

I wonder what the justification of both this moralistic emphasis is: why worry primarily about hatred and fear? Why, for example, the preference for the terminology of “homophobia,” as though these emotional states, and not active outright abuse, ridicule, and oppression, were the real problem?

I supposes it might be a casual belief that most forms of bigotry are primarily based in emotional states like hatred and fear, so they should be the main target in fighting anti-bigotry. That strikes me as naive and inefficient, since it doesn’t acknowledge or target the origins of those emotional states in broader social conditions and relationships.

Perhaps it’s more strategic: a form of internal critique, attempt to use a bigot’s own values against his or her prejudice. For example, nobody wants to be a coward, so if I call your bigotry fear, it’s more likely to psychologically motivate you to lose it? So it’s not necessarily accurate, but more effective?

I have gotten tired of extending any courtesies to people opposed to equal rights for gays. (It goes beyond gay marriage, because in the USA, several states are proposing laws where gov’t and private parties could refuse to provide service to a gay person.)

Your religion says being gay is bad? Don’t let them join your church, then. But civil marriage has nothing to do with religion. I wish there were some typographical way to drill that into people’s skulls. Atheists get married. Hindus get married. Lots of non-Christian people get married. This entire debate hinges on an equivocation between “marriage” the religious ritual and “marriage” the civil status.

So if Friedersdorf, or anyone else, is pretending there’s a valid religious objection to gay civil marriage, fuck ’em.

Friedersdorf’s post is useful in that it is pure example of the libertarian tendency to favor Business freedom over individual freedom ever time.

not only hateful, but hypocritical: the religious pick and choose which part of the text to emphasize.
On the other hand, my mom volunteers at St Joes, and they provide a calorie rich lunch free to anyone who shows up.
People are not all good or all bad.

I grew up in a politically left-wing, socially liberal Christian household, and even now – many years of adult life later – the extent to which “Christian” translates as “deeply deeply concerned about what other people do with their genitalia” still beats the hell out of me. (I mean, where, people? JC didn’t say very much – compare the Synoptics to the collected speeches of, say, Tony Blair or GWB – and he was really quite specific on a lot of quite demanding points. On the boinking, not so much.)

To be fair, I have struggled with the whole “why do you hate us?” line of argument; it’s clear that lots of people who oppose giving gay people equal rights don’t have any animus towards actual gay people, they just… don’t think it would be… right. The great thing about Panti Bliss’s intervention is that it goes a couple of steps behind that answer: homophobia isn’t about hating actual gay people, it’s about holding beliefs which make it natural and normal to act as if you did. And they’re beliefs that we all hold, to a greater or lesser extent, because we’ve all been brought up that way.

Friedersdorf’s argument just doesn’t make sense. Essentially, he puts the following burden on his opponents: They decide that some belief or practice is bigoted or hateful. He wants them to wait before pronouncing on their conclusion. First, they have to figure out whether anyone holds to that belief or practice for reasonable, justified, whatever religious reasons. If someone does, they have to pull back on their opposition to the belief. Since he almost certainly doesn’t extent the same privilege to every religion, it’s hypocritical, too. I do not have to ask myself, before criticizing a practice, whether it’s some legitimate part of some legitimate religion, much less research the question before I’m able to act.

in the USA, several states are proposing laws where gov’t and private parties could refuse to provide service to a gay person.

For private parties, that’s the historical general law of the land–you can refuse to provide services to anybody, on any grounds that seem good to you. This general freedom was constrained by the Civil Rights Acts, and that constraint was permitted in Heart of Atlanta–but that constraint is narrow. In general, except for specific businesses and specific named categories, any business can refuse to serve anyone it wants for any reason it wants.

Eugene Volok has a good summary here, in the context of cab drivers who do not want to transport alcohol.

“Eugene Volok has a good summary here, in the context of cab drivers who do not want to transport alcohol.”

If you do not want to drive people and their purchases don’t be a cab driver. Same applies to wedding photographers and bakers.

‘Homophobic’ and ‘homophobia’ strike me as obviously pejorative terms, in ways that terms like ‘Catholic’ or ‘traditional marriage advocate’ do not. However, under Panti Bliss’s rendering, and your summary of his position, anyone who actively or passively opposes ‘full’ participation and rights for gays is a homophobe. Thus, there’s no way to be a full-communion Catholic or traditional marriage advocate without being a homophobe. That seems not obviously right, precisely because part of the pejorative charge of ‘homophobia’ has precisely to do with the mental state of the person who’s the object of the charge. If there is no pejorative aspect of the word, then what is the point of calling Catholics or traditional marriage advocates ‘homophobes’ in the first place? Why not call them the term they use to self-describe themselves and their position?

Also, you’re begging the question against the traditional marriage advocate when you say that homophobic bigotry amounts to a passive or active opposition to the full participation, with full rights, of gays in society. Precisely the assumption at issue is the definition of ‘full’. Traditional marriage advocates think there’s a fundamental difference between women and men, and these differences are manifested/codified in the marriage bond. Therefore, gays aren’t being denied anything, since they aren’t qualified to marry one another in the first place; even ‘denied’ marriage rights, gays are participating fully in society. Obviously equal marriage advocates disagree.

To deny this rendering of the traditional marriage position on the grounds that their worldview is false just is to say that the traditional marriage position is false, and that really is to beg the question.

“Incoherent pro-gay argument.”

Hardly incoherent roy. These people just want to be treated with respect.

/Of course you have never been a dependable ally on gay rights issues.

There were reasons why I did not choose to join the military as a career. Chief amongst them was the near certainty that in the military I would be commanded to do things that I found deeply morally objectionable. Similarly if my principal today commanded that we teach that (eg) homosexuality was sinful I would resign. If the “bakers of conscience” really don’t want to bake for gay weddings, then, as mentioned above, find another profession. (It should be noted that many christians throughout many places and times made much greater sacrifices for their faith than a mere career change.)

Additionally, living in AZ I’ve been fully exposed to the SB 1062 debate. A couple of quick thoughts. 1: I’d love to see all quaker business owners refusing to serve members of the military or the NRA, and using 1062 as their justification. (Not meaning that I actually would have wanted that to happen, but that it’s more clearly justified by 1062 than any anti-gay animus is.) 2. The bill discriminates against me as an atheist. It lets everybody else discriminate, but not me.

And a quick point about the generation gap on these issues: my (hs) students unanimously thought 1062 was idiotic. In our discussions of it my strawmen were the only pro-1062 arguments on the table.

Sorry – having the freedom to do something is not the same as forcing everyone to celebrate it with you. A close corollary to this is are people that violate the law to support a cause they feel transcends the law.
In the case of SSM, its not always a matter of hate, but rather finding it silly. People like me feel that if you want to marry a person of the same gender, you can. Don’t expect me to celebrate it, however. Unfortunately this whole process demeans the institution – in my personal opinion. Which has no legal weight. If you look at the numbers of children born out of marriage its clear that marriage as an institution is on the skids, and SSM is just reinforcing how silly people regard marriage these days.
Hating Conor for stating what he said is hypocritical at the least, and hateful at the most.

Incoherent anti-gay argument.
Incoherent pro-gay argument.
And it’s very important you choose one or the other, because incoherence is all that will save us now.
Proponents of gay marriage:
“We were born this way and nothing can change that.”

Is the point here that you can cherry-pick as ably as Pat Robertson?

Look roy I actually probably agree that the argument “people are born gay” is a bad one. But that’s all it may be – a bad argument. That’s not on the same level as “god hates [gays]” which is not a “bad” argument so much as not an argument at all, but rather oppressive speech.

I also can’t see how someone could view same-sex marriage as “sinful” and not have some massive bigotry toward gay people. It strikes me as impossible.

And, seriously, people. Grow up on the whole “sin” thing. The ogre god of the bible thought it was an abomination, subject to the death penalty, to wear two different fabrics at the same time; eat shellfish; plow your fields in a non-orthodox manner; talk back to your parents; work on the Saturdays; or fail to scream out loudly enough in the city while being raped.

The bible isn’t exactly the best guide for sane, rational discussion of how to live a proper life.

Any close look at Leviticus and Deuteronomy will take one down the rabbit hole into surreal and colossal crazy time, when it comes to what constitutes a “sin.” And the major stories, if taken literally, show that in literary form.

The god of the bible brings death suddenly into the world because Adam and Eve eat an apple. They had no parents, schooling, “role-models” or direct face-time with any other beings who spoke with them. They had no books or oral traditions to derive “morality” and “ethics” from. They were never tutored. Yet this crazed, highly insecure ogre god brings death and misery into the world because they got hungry and curious.

If “religious” people want to call homosexuality a “sin” because it’s in the bible, then be consistent. It is but one of hundreds of “sins” named by the tyrannical madman in that anthology. If you decide to cherry pick, you shouldn’t get any cover for your bigotries — especially political cover.

Christian H,

Of course people are born gay. Just as heteros are born being attracted to the opposite sex.

The thing is some heteros want to think of it all as a “choice” and a “lifestyle” so they can pin themselves with the “moral” badge, and others with the “immoral” badge. If it’s not a choice, if it’s biological — which is the case — that’s much harder to do.

Nicely said, Henry.

@22
“I could just as easily say that the world began when two space beings, both of whom bore a striking resemblance to Jimmy Durante, thumbed their noses at each other and the universe was born.”

Too late- Scientology already grabbed this one.

Good post. There’s not much to debate here (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Whatever the research says it is none of my business if two people wanna be partners of some sort. It’s the anti-gay-marriage argument that requires hair-splitting around sexuality, the pro argument requires none.

“Why would it be a bad argument? Are you saying that people can just decided not to be gay? Because I hate to tell you this but, in the vast majority of cases, they can’t.”

It’s a bad argument because there’s nothing wrong with being gay regardless of whether or not you can exercise choice in the matter. Whether its nature, nurture, or free choice as exercised through Descartes’s pineal gland is irrelevant. If people *could* choose to not be gay, treating them poorly because of their failure to make that choice would still be stupid, immoral bigotry.

JanieM and GiT,

Excellent points. I should remember to add that when I say it is biological. There is nothing wrong with it regardless — choice or natural.

But I do think religious condemnation comes primarily from the belief that it is a “choice” and a “lifestyle,” something that a “proper” religious upbringing or intervention can change.

I think that’s the basis for their condemnation, along with their cherry picking of the bible. That it is a “sin” because of “free will” and all of that, etc. etc.

If their god created gay and straight alike, it’s far more difficult for them to pull that trick.

“2. Denying services as a general right of businesses. MPA Victoria’s “If you do not want to drive people and their purchases don’t be a cab driver. Same applies to wedding photographers and bakers.” seems way too broad. Of course we want to give people the right to not provide a service. If you’d like a sympathetic example, take someone who provides services with special cultural meaning/significance (think ethnic dance or music performances). Now a sorority wants to hire them for their racist ” beer olympics” that ridicules their culture. Surely we want them to be allowed to say no?
I’m not sure where exactly to draw the line here – starting with banning discrimination against protected classes and for essential services seems pretty straightforward, so what’s left would be margin-cases like the booze & the muslim cabbie. I don’t think there are clear-cut rules for such cases.”

I am going to need to think on this one. Interesting example adam.

I also can’t see how someone could view same-sex marriage as “sinful” and not have some massive bigotry toward gay people. It strikes me as impossible.

Many commenters seem to be afflicted with this inability, so maybe an analogy will help.

It is possible to think that smoking is harmful to self and to others, without being “massively bigoted against smokers.”

“But I do think religious condemnation comes primarily from the belief that it is a “choice” and a “lifestyle,” something that a “proper” religious upbringing or intervention can change.”

I think that’s just a convenient cover or rhetorical tool. “It should be as easy as quitting your bowling league!” They don’t care about the origins. They’re just operating on the basis of disgust. If they were to admit it can be “natural”, it would still be proper to suppress and deny it, like all the “natural” things they already do this with.

Yeah sorry – I really meant “bad argument” as Jamie and others described, not “wrong argument”. (I also think that if understood as an absolute it’s wrong just like all “it’s 1005 nature, 0% nurture” type arguments, but as pointed out in informed debate it is of course not taken a such an absolute.)

Denial of service is just Jim Crow in various guises.

Once a person opens a business to the public they lose that “right.” They don’t get to decide what “the public” is. It’s simply not their call. The public is all of us.

We already grant business owners far, far too much power in this society. They already hold massively disproportionate power, wealth, voice and control over others. At a minimum, in a capitalist society, the public is the public. As a part of that very bad bargain of turning over massively disproportionate power and wealth and control should come the right of the consumer to go wherever they want to go and know they will be served.

It’s the least the business owner can do in exchange for his or her grotesquely oversized influence and control over our economic destiny.

GiT,

I can see that to a degree. For instance, sexual abstinence in general. Whether hetero or gay, we are naturally sexual creatures. Sexual abstinence is not “natural” to our species. But the three monotheisms, and especially Christianity, preach the suppression and repression of our sexuality.

Which is why I think a lot of the anti-abortion movement is really about sexual repression, not saving blastocysts. If they really wanted to do that, if they really wanted to prevent abortions, they’d be on every street corner handing out condoms, etc. etc. But they don’t, because they also seem to believe that birth control increases having sex. And they don’t want that.

In defense of Chritianity and to complicate this thread most scholars (who read ancient Hebrew and Classical Greek) do not think that the Bible (Tanakh or New Testament) condemns same sex behavior as many modern Christians think it does. Part of the reason is a history of problematic translation into English. See, e.g. Jesus. the Bible and Homosexuality by Jack Rogers and David Jensen’s God. Desire and a Theology of Human Sexuality. The interesting question is why are so many churches and Christians uninterested in the scholarship? For the unchurched among you ponder Matthew 19:12 while recalling the ancient Jewish view of eunuchs.

The problem with these absurd examples like “secular Sam the plumber who doesn’t want to fix the butcher’s plumbing because of his militant veganism” and “racist sororities hiring ethnic groups to perform so they can treat them in a racist and demeaning fashion” is that they basically never happen. I’m sure you can track down a few examples if you really tried, but I’ll give you $5 for one you find if you promise me $1 back for any example of anti-LGBT discrimination I can find. I’m suspect zero people take that deal. All this agonizing over whether the line is just sufficiently clear or not is out of proportion to the actual existing discrimination that people are suffering here on planet Earth and not in whatever rarefied theoretical air Volokh inhabits. So maybe it would be kind of a bummer if secular Sam was forced to repair the butcher’s plumbing, but it’s not a real problem that seriously demands our consideration. The actual rules need to be weighted in accordance with how many people they’d affect, and right now, the main use of so-called “religious conscience” exemptions is to get out of providing general services because you don’t like the way some people live. Sorry, if you want to be a fully participating member of society, you don’t get to do that, and I’m glad you don’t get to do it. Whatever meager infringement that constitutes on your “religious freedom” is more than balanced by the actual freedom gained by discriminated-against minorities who no longer have to worry about being treated like second-class citizens.

@JanieM: If whether or not it’s a choice doesn’t matter, what’s the principled basis for anyone choosing not to serve, say, KKK members? Are you really willing to say, “If you don’t want to cater that Klan event, get out of the baking business?”

Yes, let’s spend a lot of time worrying about something that has probably happened like three times in American history so we can avoid creating rules to counteract discrimination that is historically and presently pervasive.

If whether or not it’s a choice doesn’t matter, what’s the principled basis for anyone choosing not to serve, say, KKK members? Are you really willing to say, “If you don’t want to cater that Klan event, get out of the baking business?”

This is either too inane or too complicated to answer, but I’m glad Jerry made a stab at it.

If whether it’s a choice or not matters, why do people get to be protected for choosing certain religious beliefs?

Or, what CJColucci said.

The problem I see with this line of argument is that it proves too much. If these religious beliefs, however sincere, are bigoted, and if the teaching of bigotry is dangerous to a free society, then a moral obligation to take the fight to the bigots — in the private sphere, as well as the public — is implied. The power relationship no longer figures into it; it is meritorious to kick bigots when they are down. We wouldn’t stop at closing the bakeries; we’d have to break into the churches.

People who believe that those called to their priesthood must be celibate, or that those sealed in their temples must be baptized and paid up on tithes, or that those claiming hereditary descent from Aaron mustn’t marry divorcées or converts, are also propagating (or at least quietly holding, and maintaining by example) views that the public sphere will not, and should not, countenance. If such beliefs are socially dominant (or have been so within living memory), then they exercise a sort of coercive monopoly power and may need to be actively challenged just to clear the public space for others: this is roughly the case with opposition to gay marriage in the West today. But we don’t cross their lintels to shut them down, burn their altars and scatter their adherents . . . unless, as in the case of frank racial bigotry (Bob Jones, NGK in South Africa), we consider their beliefs toxic even stripped of public voice or power.

In the current context, this point is somewhat academic; no one can decently argue (though the right is having a go at it) that LBGT Power Triumphant holds the public sphere today. So the limited point that somebody can object to sanctioning violations of a purity code without being a bigot doesn’t buy him much; he still has to respect and acknowledge gay marriage as a nod to the civic will and a fruit of the same personal autonomy that protects him in his cloisters. But in principle I see a very big difference between compelling a rabbi (in a Christian country where rabbis don’t own TV networks) to permit an interracial marriage in his shul (supposing arguendo that somewhere in the world there is a rabbi who opposes that) on the one hand, and compelling him to permit an intermarriage on the other. And, inside his shul, a gay marriage resembles the latter much more than the former. So there is a distinction of principle here that still matters.

to kick bigots when they are down

Down?

We wouldn’t stop at closing the bakeries

What did we close?

5. I think it’s important to fight part of this issue precisely on the basis of free choice. My first-class citizenship status shouldn’t be dependent on whether I’m willing to constrain my choices according to other people’s religious beliefs.

@68: Down?

Just what I said in para 3 @67: no one can decently claim today that the agora is already clear and we’re policing the cellars. My point is merely that unfashionable religious principle has rights in the private sphere that bigotry should not enjoy. It’s a fine point for a better world with better problems (bim’hera b’yamenu).

JanieM,

Fair enough. But, at least from my POV, it’s important to always link this with hetero and gay. As in, neither has a choice in the matter. I can definitely see it as problematic if some how this is all confused and knotted up to become:

Heteros have a choice. Gay people don’t.

I don’t buy that for a second. I think we have a very strong biological drive toward attraction of opposite or same sex. We lean, biologically, one way or another. Socialization can sometimes overcome that natural lean, as it most likely did in various cultures throughout history. It was socially accepted, for instance, in ancient Greece, (Sparta, especially), Rome, in part of the Celtic world, etc. etc . . . though class and gender issues further modified that acceptance.

Nature and nurture and the environment, etc. In short, it’s far too complicated and dynamic to be left up to the collected and heavily edited texts of ancient religions.

I for one have never seen or heard of a florist or cake shop that presents itself as “Catholic Weddings Only,” for instance.

It’s pretty intrinsic to the decision to open such a business in the first place that you are going to provide services to people with different beliefs and values than your own.

Just another reason I have no sympathy for these bigots. Ya don’t wanna be associated with icky gay weddings? Get out of the wedding-support business.

Actually, on that last point, I may backtrack a bit. Even when I was a believer in the sinfulness of gay sex, I was in favor of equal rights for all. Sexual sins weren’t the government’s business.

Though that contradicts my opposition to gay marriage. I haven’t thought much about what I was thinking back then, so it’s a little confused in my memory. I probably would have opposed gay marriage if someone had proposed it in, say, 1990, but if exposed to arguments in favor of civil marriage I think I could have been persuaded to see that civil marriage was none of my business and Christians had no right to tell others how to live their lives.

Asking a rabbi to perform a gay marriage (or lose his zoning, tax status, etc.) is where we get one answer if we are trying to root out bigotry, but a different answer if we are broadly tolerating acts of conscience.

What? Where is the rabbi or any other religious official being asked to do this? Look, it’s possible to both a) “respect” (in a legal sense) the prerogative for clergy to set their own rules regarding what constitutes a legitimate marriage ceremony in the eyes of their religious order, and b) mandate that businesses which are open to the general public cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. In fact, we know empirically that this is possible when it comes to race, because it’s been the legal status quo for decades now, and somehow racist churches have not been shutdown by an influx of lawsuits demanding that they officiate interracial marriages. Turns out, religions aren’t businesses*; who knew?!

And it’s not a nonexistent problem, because there are assuredly people who passionately wish to be married by the most traditional member of their chosen clergy who will have them, and who would use the power of the state to push this envelope if that power allowed itself to be thus wielded.

Oh, well, if it’s such a serious problem, please to be taking my bet upthread!

“There possibly exist some people who fit these hypothetical descriptions I have just invented” is not an argument, and there is no legal mechanism for a gay couple to force a church to officiate their gay wedding.

*: although some forms of charismatic Protestantism do come awful close

Joshua W. Burton 03.05.14 at 9:41 pm
” Asking a baker to cater a gay marriage as a public accommodation (or lose his lease etc.) is within the public sphere where this isn’t the relevant distinction. Asking a rabbi to perform a gay marriage (or lose his zoning, tax status, etc.) is where we get one answer if we are trying to root out bigotry, but a different answer if we are broadly tolerating acts of conscience. And it’s not a nonexistent problem, because there are assuredly people who passionately wish to be married by the most traditional member of their chosen clergy who will have them, and who would use the power of the state to push this envelope if that power allowed itself to be thus wielded.”

For those who might believe this argument, every single law I’ve heard about on gay marriage, rights, etc. has clear protections for religions and there is a First Amendment and considerable case law on this.

JV @83: In fact, we know empirically that this is possible when it comes to race, because it’s been the legal status quo for decades now, and somehow racist churches have not been shutdown by an influx of lawsuits demanding that they officiate interracial marriages.

Well, then, for “church” read “religious school” (though I strongly doubt that an unredeemed Afrikaaner NG Kerk could defend itself in the US on 1st Amendment grounds today). The law of the land is clear on racial discrimination in schools: must a seminary, yeshiva or madrassa admit gay students to keep its 1A “free exercise” rights, or is there a distinction here, contra the OP?

Oh, well, if it’s such a serious problem, please to be taking my bet upthread!

Not sure the terms of the bet fit the situation I’m describing. I know a lot of gay Orthodox Jews, most of whom are conventionally intolerant of more liberal Jewish denominations. Several couples will be (civilly) married this summer, when my local jurisdiction sorts out the rules.

You say: It’s entirely possible that the people in question justify their refusal on some version of ‘love the sinner, hate the sin.’ But Friedersdorf’s suggestion that this is not itself a kind of bigotry seems to me to be very obviously wrong. I tend to agree in the context you discuss but am not as certain as you appear to be. Apply the thinking to a somewhat different context, that of religion rather than gay rights. A Catholic (or choose your religion) can be a bigot who hates Muslims (or choose another religion). She may elect to dissuade her daughter to marry a Muslim because all Muslims are terrible people, in which case I would say she is a bigot. Or, she may seek to dissuade her daughter from marrying a Muslim because she believes it important that her grandchildrens’ parents both be Catholic and bring up their children as devoted Catholic parents and is otherwise positively disposed towards Muslims; and, is indeed a member of the Board of Directors of the Muslim Defense League. I would not be comfortable calling her a bigot. And, I expect that those who would are of that view simply because they do not find religious views of much importance.

I don’t support forcing every business to accept every customer, but given how that’s not something that anyone has ever tried to make happen, I’m going to spend zero time worrying about this hypothetical future that anti-discrimination laws don’t help bring about anyway.

well, I was responding to someone who did at least appear to make that argument. I think getting the details of discrimination laws right is more important and more difficult than you allow. I agree this isn’t terribly hard for businesses discriminating against gays (and I’ve said so from the start): Designate sexual orientation protected category –> discriminating against someone bec. of sexual orientation is illegal, the end.
But what to do with cases where no protected category is involved is neither trivial nor irrelevant (not least because sexual orientation isn’t protected in many places). Nor is which categories we should protect and which we shouldn’t. E.g. currently age is only a protected category under federal law once you’re over 40.

Yeah, most of the time, if you think a customer is more trouble than they’re worth or you just don’t like them or whatever, you say, “sorry, we’re booked.” And you move on. Considering how hard discrimination is to prove, the plumber telling you they’re too busy or the music teacher not having time in the schedule for you is likely the end of the conversation

but you’re throwing a lot of things together here. You don’t have to state prejudice to be discriminating. E.g. in NYC, racial discrimination in property is proven by sting operations with actors from different races (great This American Life show on this). If you systematically discriminate against a protected group that’s illegal and not just hypothetically so. And we do want to define, legally, for which groups of people this applies. That is, in fact, one of the most significant struggles in anti-discrimination activism. I don’t know why you just brush this aside?

The law of the land is clear on racial discrimination in schools: must a seminary, yeshiva or madrassa admit gay students to keep its 1A “free exercise” rights, or is there a distinction here, contra the OP?

There is no First Amendment right to a tax exemption. If you want the exemption, you play by the rules. If you don’t feel like playing, pay up and do what you want.

I know a lot of gay Orthodox Jews, most of whom are conventionally intolerant of more liberal Jewish denominations. Several couples will be (civilly) married this summer, when my local jurisdiction sorts out the rules.

Ok, and so what? Like, that’s a bummer for your gay friends, but I don’t see what it shows. If they don’t want to be part of a more liberal Jewish denomination, they can start their own, if they feel so inclined. The law still won’t make an Orthodox temple officiate their ceremony, nor should it.

The law of the land is clear on racial discrimination in schools: must a seminary, yeshiva or madrassa admit gay students to keep its 1A “free exercise” rights, or is there a distinction here, contra the OP?

That’s exactly the point I was trying to get at with my first post at @44. I don’t see any problem in treating bigotry differently legally and morally.
I’ll call such yeshivas, seminaries etc. bigotted, most certainly. But as CJColucci points out, bigotry itself is protected by the 1st amendment.
There is no question that churches can hold bigotted doctrine and still enjoy tax exemptions etc. The question is what to do with religious schools and the like. I’d tend to say that schools who don’t accept gay students do not serve the public interest and should not receive tax exemptions (though they should obviously _not_ be closed. No one argued that the feds should close down Bob Jones U).

But what to do with cases where no protected category is involved is neither trivial nor irrelevant (not least because sexual orientation isn’t protected in many places). Nor is which categories we should protect and which we shouldn’t. E.g. currently age is only a protected category under federal law once you’re over 40.

It’s not actually that hard. Step 1: do some studies to determine if the discrimination exists. Step 2: add that class of people to the protected class category.

This is not a difficult exercise to do with regard to race, nor is it difficult to do with regard to sexual orientation. We know discrimination happens on those grounds. So we pass laws to protect those groups of people. We don’t have to consider every possible permutation of all the possible interactions before we are able to codify in law a sensible principle like “discriminating against LGBT people is wrong.”

but you’re throwing a lot of things together here. You don’t have to state prejudice to be discriminating. E.g. in NYC, racial discrimination in property is proven by sting operations with actors from different races (great This American Life show on this). If you systematically discriminate against a protected group that’s illegal and not just hypothetically so. And we do want to define, legally, for which groups of people this applies. That is, in fact, one of the most significant struggles in anti-discrimination activism. I don’t know why you just brush this aside?

I’m not brushing it aside; obviously what you say is correct. I just don’t see it as the primary point of discussion in this case. It has nothing to do with Volokh’s fantasyland of vegan plumbers, which he apparently fears will be right around the corner if we aren’t very nice to bigots.

I just don’t have a lot of time for this casuistry of trying to gin up hypotheticals that practically never actually happen in order to try and argue against legislation that could provide real relief to real people, right now. As I said, we do not need to conceive of and debate every theoretical permutation here. I mean, there is absolutely zero reason to think that Volokh is somehow sincere in his concern for those hypothetical people that he dreams up; that’s just a sideshow intended to muddy the waters and justify the persistence of a whole boatload of bigotry for just a little longer. It’s a typical libertarian “freedom” charade and I’m not having any of it.

“My understanding of the research is that we believe that homosexuality is the result of an interplay between genetic and environmental factors. ”

If genetic factors are involved then aren’t you in fact “born that way” in some sense of the term? I agree with Christian that it is not some sort of 100% gay gene scenario but genetics does play a role so if homosexuals want to say “I was born this way” I don’t think it is your place to correct them.

Agree with the post.

I would just go a step further. I would say that essentially all bigotry is principled bigotry. There has never been any kind of discrimination that was not justified in terms of some kind of principle. The pure, unmotivated animus that Friedersdorf wants us to reserve terms like racism or homophobia for, does not exist.

Religious people just need to learn that their religion, and religion in general, just isn’t as special as they think it is.

Their attempt to carve out religion specifically in the Arizona would-be-law was tactically stupid.

They could have had a debate about whether a mom-and-pop business should be allowed to apply personal morality in business decisions, but by trying to make the legal test one of whether or not an objection is “religious” they were going to fail. They knew all along that “religious” ideas includes a bunch of stuff they themselves find repugnant (e.g. Islamic practice from a Christian perspective), and on their better days they even remember that their own sacred texts contain a bunch of silly stuff that they happily ignore.

As I understand it, the fact that Muslims might appreciate such a law did eventually get well publicized in Arizona, and this apparently helped aid the law’s demise.

I don’t think Fridersdorf argues that the photographer should be allowed to discriminate, and he certainly doesn’t deny that the photograher did discriminate. Set aside for a moment the tension here between individual liberty and non-discrimination law. Whether you think the New Mexico Supreme Court decided the case rightly or wrongly, that is separate from the question of what motivated Elaine Huguenin.

Unless you really believe that the only motive for discrimination is hatred, it seems you have to agree with Fridersdorf’s claim that whether someone discriminated is a separate question from whether they hate the object of their discrimination. It seems to me that one of the reasons that discrimination is so pervasive is that it serves the economic interest of powerful people whose self(ish) interest provides sufficient motive for discrimination even absent any animus, much less outright hate.

I think the practice of discrimination reasonably suggests the suspicion that the agent is a bigot, and I think if I had to choose I know what I’d say about photographer in this case. But I don’t have to choose, and the presence of some of the details Fridersdorf shares make me less certain than I’d be otherwise.

I also think the assumption that bigotry is the motive for all discrimination tends to fix individual acts of discrimination as paragimatic and diverts attention from institutional discrimination.

For me, bigotry, prejudice and discrimination are three different things, though they often travel together. And the only one that requires hatred is bigotry.

“For me, bigotry, prejudice and discrimination are three different things, though they often travel together. And the only one that requires hatred is bigotry.”

Why should I care why they refuse me service? Isn’t it enough that they do ?

If the photographer says, “I can’t do it; I’m booked” or “Sorry, I’m away that weekend”, whether the excuse is true or not, they’ve refused service, but it has a rather different meaning from, “I won’t do it, because I don’t want anything to do with you people and your perversion.”

Plume’s contention that it is “improbable” one can be anti-gay marriage while not being bigoted seems less compelling than, say, Thomas Reid’s contention that you can’t be angry at an object when you realize it is inanimate (i.e., a chair you stubbed your toe on). But perhaps this is only slightly so. There is something about Plume’s argument that resonates.

Aristodemus makes an excellent argument which I think is close to the cutting edge on this issue, at least amongst Catholic philosophers – the classic “type” distinction. However, another look at that “incompatible types” argument reveals a very shaky assertion. There are gay penguin couples. There are three men and a baby! What exactly is incompatible here? An appeal to the reasons for sex and marriage isn’t going to convince.

In Michigan, Tuesday’s news was about the gay marriage trial. Atty. Genl. Bill Schuette, who has presided over the rollback of a number of civil liberties under a conservative flag in recent years, has attempted to direct county clerks to disregard Federal law. For testimony, the State’s “Princeton-educated philsopher” (poor fellow didn’t even get his name in print) got disqualified from testifying, so they went to Mark Regnerus, who has a lot of fine-sounding things to say about the problem of people jumping to conclusions and potentially disrupting what are (to hear him tell it) potentially finely-tuned, almost hairtrigger social learning mechanisms.

And in fact I think this is where the cutting edge of anti-gay marriage-without-bigotry thought is: It’s not settled what might be the “best” average approach.

But that’s not saying much. Some of the ‘potential disruption’ is clearly due to society’s pressure on children and families not to live in households headed by “nontraditional couples.” There is no settled account of how people learn various roles, let alone how adaptive they may be in reaching different potential roles, but the smart money is on people being more flexible than was assumed – history has not simply been the happy atomic family structure from Little House on the Prairie. At the very least, people have survived and even built the modern world in times of great upheaval, with massive rates of child abandonment and orphanages.

In this state, there’s thousands of children who are waiting for foster care – “3000 children at any time” according to the state’s adoption website.

Society is trying to perform triage on these real social problems – “up to 40% of all homeless people in the US identify as LGBT” (The BBC’s Altered States program from 16 October 2013, filmed in Detroit.)

Surely I haven’t answered the question about whether, in a situation where there is choice, homosexual couples can raise children better than hetero couples. For that I think that the argument must be “not much difference, especially in the presence of more robust social support structures.” If anything, the obsession of society with small-people ownership, in “parental rights,” in the quiet retirement for the elders and a small house for four by the curb for young parents has deprived many children of more opportunities for support and enrichment than gay parents have.

I pondered the argument towards conservativism as a guiding principle on and off occasionally. Even in the absence of our family crisis, why is it that Mr. Regnerus (crusader or not, I could admire his willingness not to insist upon a “Dr.”) has to argue in favor of mixed-sex couples for children as the preferred model, when in fact he says that the science is unsettled and it could go either way? I mean, the science isn’t even there to say that mixed-sex couples do at least as good a job as same-sex couples! What sways the debate at the moment is, again, that crisis of orphans and others needing a new home, and if we have to limit it to rights, the right of people of all types to procreate.

It really is nonsense to present gay parenting as the adoption of orphans. I know people love doing that for PR reasons, but it’s vanishingly rare, most orphans predictably get adopted by relatives – not kindly gay couples Daddy Warbucks style. Most children in foster care are there because of temporary problems with their family, and don’t need adopting.

The overwhelming majority of kids with ‘gay parents’ are the product of one parent’s failed heterosexual relationships. The next biggest portion are created through surogacy/IVF. Then lastly the smallest group are through adoption, mostly from overseas, some of whom might be orphans – but as there isn’t always a full audit trail we can’t be sure.

Gay marriage is worrying because it does deeply effect the rights of children. For most of history we made do with the presumption of legitimacy for determining parenthood. Then for a brief moment DNA testing raised the possibility of a sensible parenthood laws. The gay rights movement has trashed that, and is absolutely working for a move away from the rights of biological parents and revitalised child of the family provisions, step parental adoption, the presumption of legitimacy, surogacy, and so on.

“The gay rights movement has trashed that, and is absolutely working for a move away from the rights of biological parents and revitalised child of the family provisions, step parental adoption, the presumption of legitimacy, surogacy, and so on.”

So what?

I think Henry is wrong in framing Friedersdorf claim as being that sincerely-religiously-against-gay-marriage people aren’t bigots, in the sense of hating the objects of their discrimination. He’s only saying that they aren’t necessarily bigots.

Henry is doing no such thing. He’s saying that the distinction Friedersdorf makes between bigots and people who have absolutely nothing against gays, but just don’t think they should have equal rights is non-sensical. That second group of people are also bigots and should be called bigots. Again, I challenge you to come up with a non-bigotted reason for refusing to photograph a gay wedding.

I assume many pro-segregationists in the South didn’t actively hate blacks. I mean – they let them take care of their children and all. But surely in wanting blacks to remain 2nd class citizens they were still bigots?

Since the dispute around legal rights to discriminate against gays in AZ would be meaningless absent a substantial pre-existing intolerance, I’ll let the lawyers and jots and tittlers have at it on that.
The official topic may concern the rules, but the subject gets its heat from contemporary sexual morality.
–
Gay marriage wasn’t on the minds of the outraged queers of the Stonewall riots. They wanted out from under the legalized sadistic oppression of the NYPD.
There’s a pink marble triangle in a little park in Amsterdam. Seriously eloquent, if you know the history behind it.
Gay marriage has been moved into the center of what these things are about. It’s become the litmus test, the signifier. Even as intrasexuals and bi’s are sort of left out of the party. What kind of marriages are bisexuals up for anyway?
I was against gay marriage as opposed to civil union (which I was and am strongly for) until a few years ago. Now I don’t really care.
Not at all because I’m in favor of societal force keeping gays from mainstream equality, but for reasons like those Alex @113 sets out so clearly. And also because:

… the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants.
This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will,” said Charles Gersbach, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University. https://tinyurl.com/kj73lxm

We’re not headed toward some kind of “Norman Rockwell+gays” thing here.
This debate is happening in a sci-fi context that most of the participating seem to think is pretty much 1950’s America. Get over this bigoted view of sexuality and everything’s going to be “normal” and nice.
What matters most, imo, is something that’s being accepted without question. The negation of human biological reality in favor of arcane power being steadily accumulated in hands that no longer seem particularly human.
Same sex marriage doesn’t have anything central to do with that. But the polarity’s locking it into a binary of acceptance/rejection. We’re losing any sense of “human”, it’s being replaced by heedless futureless consumerism.
Want a kid? Buy one, make one in a laboratory. They’re cuter than chihuahuas.
It’s not hard to see the innocence in most on both sides of the superficial question. Gays were laughingly harmed, lives destroyed – Turing! Turing for fuck’s sake! – by disdainful agents of “normal” society.
Horrendous unnecessary suffering. Sin, if there ever was sin.
Anything that stops that will be a good, in the minds and hearts of the harmed and their sympathizers.
There’s something in the knee-jerk reflex that runs parallel to the comforting, in the eyes of some feminists, presence in global politics of women like Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland.
There’s more to it.
There’s babies, yes, but there’s tradition too. And untried ways of raising children, untried unproven ways of being.
That’s the healthy part of the skeptical reaction of the base that’s galvanized behind fascist idiocy like the AZ laws.
I’m trying to get otherwise heart-motivated people on this side to see how they’re being played against an obviously inferior enemy. You should be suspicious of that.
I’ve been on the receiving end of bigoted anti-gay scorn. More than a few times, accurately delivered or not.
I’ve been fighting for some kind of healthier sex attitudes most of my adult life. Jumping from puritanical stupidity and cruelty to wide-open amorality (as long as there’s no obvious immediate harm!), isn’t going to do it.
There’s long-term invisible danger. There always is.
That’s what many decent people on the other side, whose fear and concern is being exploited, are about. Dismissing them all as ignorant bigots isn’t going to do it.
They see acceptance of gays as acceptance of hedonism, amoral selfishness. TV shows aren’t going to change that.
They’re getting confirmation of their position from an artificial, manipulative encouragement. Biblical reasons for intolerance they see as the path toward survival are amped up from the sidelines. So they see gay marriage, ultimately, as a threat to their survival, and the survival of their kids.
Nonsense, and in a calm open atmosphere of honest discussion, they’d realize that.
Instead they’re being driven into a pseudo-religious rigidity. And kept there.
The incoherence of their claims is obvious, but it needs to be answered with humane coherence, not an equally rigid mindless rejection.

WTF is up with Roy Belmont? He seems to channel several personalities – radical sexual liberation on one hand (valorizes the radicals of stonewall but tut-tuts the boring assimilationists who want marriage), bioconservative criticism of gay genetic enigineering (he lost me with his precious bodily fluids segway) and religious objection to “untried ways of raising children” & sympathy for religious zealots who are somehow being bullied and manipulated by the eltists gays.

Just seems like an elaborate attempt at concern trolling – gays are icky and they harm kids.

Alex & Roy seem to have issues with gays raising children…quit beating around the bush and spit it out…This is exactly the type of “reasonable bigotry” nonsense that homophobes constantly allude to without any evidence….

Bruce Wilder – whats the point of the elaborate explication/defense of christian conservatives? I don’t buy the attempt to shift responsibility to solely structural or institutional forces – individuals still have agency and are responsible at some level for discriminatory actions. You seem to be arguing that its ultimately the fault of gays for “destabilizing” the existing order and thats just blaming the victim.

JanieM@65: Jerry “made a stab at it”? Jerry did no more than you did when you decided my question was too inane or complicated to bother with. CJ Colucci wrote very sensibly and reasonably, but that comment wasn’t addressed to my question, I don’t think. And to answer yours @63, assuming it wasn’t merely rhetorical, I don’t think people should get protected simply because they’ve chosen some particular set of religious beliefs. But race, gender and national origin are protected classifications in large part because people don’t choose those characteristics and can’t change them. It’s a lot simpler to make the argument that sexual orientation should be a protected classification because it’s like those others than it is that it should be a protected classification because equality. If you argue, as I gather you do, that sexual orientation should be a protected classification regardless of whether it’s innate or freely chosen, then I’m left wondering how to lawfully and honestly keep the KKK out of my (admittedly purely hypothetical) bakery.

Again, I challenge you to come up with a non-bigotted reason for refusing to photograph a gay wedding.

Out-of-context and off-topic challenge accepted!

(a) Perhaps my spouse, who I love deeply and would rather not leave (even though they hold some retrograde views), has promised to divorce me if I photograph a gay wedding.

(b) Perhaps my primary interest in photographing weddings is artistic, tightly bound to the private sexual thrill I get from capturing images of men and women performing cultural rituals of virginity and submission in the hours and minutes before they engage in coitus. Gay weddings hold no interest for me either as an artist or as a sexual being. I just don’t get the same charge from them, never have. I don’t feel that I could do a very good job as a photographer if I’m not artistically/erotically stimulated, and I refuse to take commissions which I feel would result in substandard work.

(c) Perhaps I am a recently divorced homosexual person, and I feel that observing and photographing gay weddings would bring back very unpleasant and (now) traumatic memories of my own wedding day. For my own mental health, and on the advice of my therapist, I’m only photographing heterosexual (and some transgender) weddings.

contrary to the the holding in Bell v Maryland that public accomodation statutes are based on common law “common carrier duty”

1. While IANAL, I am literate enough to read that this is not part of the decision (which never decided on the merits), but of the concurring opinion.
2. The “common carrier” argument advanced by Douglas in his opinion is based on the claim that “Restaurants in the modern setting are as essential to travelers as inns and carriers.” in other words, he’s arguing that lunch counters provide essential services.

roy @119:
“…many decent people on the other side, whose fear and concern is being exploited, are about. Dismissing them all as ignorant bigots isn’t going to do it.”

i agree that a dialogue with these individuals is certainly preferable to just labeling them bigots and writing them out of the conversation entirely – as that path would only drive them further to the camp that is using their energy for something more pernicious. but that is still no reason to accommodate their beliefs or permit these practices. the argument about the tone of the conversation can be wholly valid but still not touch upon the question as to whether the conduct is permissible or not. we shouldn’t treat junkies like criminals, but that doesn’t mean we should permit them shooting up in public places.

And furthermore – this may be so much to the point that it is irrelevant, but… Henry’s post above is a response to an article by Conor F, itself a response to an article in Slate by M. Stern, which is itself a response to an article by Ross Douthat (a great name for a master of finger-wagging). if anyone in this debate can be accused of ‘manipulative encouragement’ of the religious and other sentiments of the American people, i would say it is him.

there may be a real concern about decadence or hedonism or amoral selfishness (or whatever) in American culture and its approach to sexuality, but pinning these things upon the gay community, even suggesting that the gay community is somehow responsible for this trend, strikes me a scapegoating pure and simple.

and i don’t know what “untried unproven ways of being” means in your post, so clarify if i misunderstand here, but your seeming approval of that element of the reaction exists in strange tension with your constructivist reading of sexual identity espoused further upthread (& even in that selfsame post).

Was it not Atrios who wrote something along the lines of “Just because your homophobia and misogyny are ordained by God doesn’t make your beliefs not homophobic or misogynistic.”

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

“Alex & Roy seem to have issues with gays raising children…quit beating around the bush and spit it out…This is exactly the type of “reasonable bigotry” nonsense that homophobes constantly allude to without any evidence….”

Yes. It’s also true that plenty of gay rights activists have issues with straight men raising their own children, and gay marriage is very popular because it can be used to usurp the rights of biological fathers and award parenthood to someone on the basis that they’re fucking the kids mom (cf child of the family provisions, step parental adoption, the presumption of legitimacy, etc).

Having just read the whole thread, I find myself mostly thinking “What Jerry Vinokurov said.” We can construct hypothetical situations of a sort intended to shock the conscience of someone like Friedersdorf. But the fact is that anti-gay bigotry is real and a regular part of many, likely most, LGBT people’s experience in ways that actually do have a material impact on their quality of life. There isn’t a major political party backing “kill the straights, and if we can’t do that, at least make sure to keep them in misery and need” efforts, nor a parade of influential wealthy zealots sponsoring legislative efforts at that. Nowhere in the world do straight people face a counterpart to the lethal official hatemongering in places from Uganda to Russia, and if they did, GLBT people and groups would smack down queer people cheering them on here at home rather than rallying to support the crusade.

Furthermore, we don’t find efforts to oppose “sure, go ahead and discriminate” legislation being pushed by people also pushing legislation to make it easier to kill people you think are threatening you.

So this is in reality a thoroughly one-sided kind of deal, and we can talk about equivalent situations only by a whole cavalcade of counterfactuals. It’s important to keep coming back to the reality, which is that straight people as a group have a lot of nasty possible leverage over LGBT people and the Arizona bill is part of a coordinated and well-funded effort to make that leverage stronger and nastier.

Also, I doubt many gay men “are fucking kids mom” – just saying…

The KKK should be allowed buy bread anywhere, and the Jewish copyshop owner should have to print the Nazi’s propaganda (unless he says something along the lines of ‘sorry, the machines broken’)
Simple

I don’t understand why anyone would want antisemitic caterer for their bar-mitzvah or homophobic photographer for their gay wedding ceremony. It is the kind of ceremony you’re talking about, not a category of people. Right? And even if they can be forced to do it, it would seem completely crazy to insist. Where’s the issue?

If “sinful” has any real purpose or meaning, it should be to describe cruelty and degrees of cruelty.

It will translate better if you think “harmful” rather than “cruel”. “Sin is actions that harm self, others, or the social fabric” is a mostly-accurate definition of what most people who use the word “sin” mean by it. (An example of “harm the social fabric” would be “liar loans”–both lender and borrower are harming the system, but they aren’t harming each other.”)

Also, to refuse service in cases where they can’t get away with ‘sorry, I’m all booked up’,
like government officials.

I consider myself an enemy of bigotry. As a white father of a black adoptive son, I have found it in places that I wish I had not. Panti has forced me, in this short talk, to look inward and see the homophobia I would choose to deny. We all need to continue to grow and learn throughout our lives. I am grateful that Panti has the courage to tell us what is so.

etseq is another troll who doesn’t read the substance of a post before making a pronouncement about it, I guess. Maybe I was unclear there, so let me try again: Regnerus’ point seems to be as developed as the anti-gay marriage argument gets – concern for children. It’s not much of a compliment when I’m saying that he misses the forest for the trees. But I still think there are some obvious gaping holes in that account (and attempted to present some of them). Does that make sense now? I’m not going to strawman views and try to use reductios where they don’t fit, if that’s what you think a reasonable commenter should be doing.

Roy Belmont nearly gets it right when he talks about “untried ways” of not only raising children but being. Where I differ is that I think that not only have these things happened endlessly throughout human history and throughout nature, but I also raise an objection to the hetero couples model being that much better, or necessary than, alternate models of living.

Alex has a point about gay marriage not being a catch-all, but nobody who has a brain expects it to be. Raising gay supremacy in this thread is a very strange move at best – I’m just going to laugh at that one. The personality flaws that disqualify a person from raising a child have no obvious connection to sexual orientation, in either way. I’ve known some hopeless couples on both sides.

Perhaps society has an interest in modeling gender roles a certain way. But what is that interest grounded on? Tradition, it seems. There have been plenty of societies which seem more “feminine” than ours, either in terms of their own traditions or having a more matriarchal sexual power balance, and they didn’t exactly collapse in on themselves in an orgy of dangerous gayness. Nothing against people being macho, but again, that’s not the only way the world can work here.

@ Plume: So then we can take my comment as a tentative expansion of your comment. I appreciate you’ve made a stronger claim than I presented, though, so thanks for the correction. But how about that stronger claim: Can somebody be anti-gay marriage without being bigoted in some fashion or other?

Just going by the numbers, I think the thread shows the answer is not as clear as one might think. The only things that look like non-bigoted responses to the pro- side of this discussion have pretty obvious gaping holes in them, like Aristodemus’ question-begging that we should be convinced there is a “type mismatch.” I know that a utilitarian / consequentialist view of the harms of a type mismatch is not likely in keeping with the ethical tradition that comes from, but I point out that just saying there is some kind of ‘fundamental difference in kind’ is not convincing at all.

It is the authoritarian threat that makes me think it would be good to pivot to a defense of freedom of sexual choice, with gay relationships a legitimate part of that range of personal autonomy. In a time when technology is stripping us of some of the props of personal privacy, it may be important to think through how we honor and protect the individual’s core self, within a society that supports the choices an individual makes from private as well as public attack.

If you re-wrote this, with [sexual choice] replaced by [economic choice], and [gay relationships] replaced with [running a business], this is pretty much exactly what the people described in this thread as “bigots” would say.

I think the phrase “core self” is revealing. What is our core self, and what does it encompass? I think this is a large part of the contention here, between people who prioritise individual sexual freedom as a key part of the “core self” versus people who don’t, and hence see little problem with the notion of society overriding or at least putting pressure on people’s sexual decisions; and between people who see economic freedom as a key part of the “core self” versus people who don’t, and hence see little problem with the notion of societal overriding or at least putting pressure on people’s economic decisions.

Shared Humanity: “We all need to continue to grow and learn throughout our lives.” This is it, really. It turns out that one of the trials of aging in a heterogeneous society is that it never stops. There’s no point at which we ever get to say, right, done it, I’m fully enlightened and considering everyone’s well-being as fully as I’d wish them consider mine, I have nothing more major to learn. There’s always something we haven’t realized we need to do, or stop doing, and so we never get to coast along on a solid and sure foundation of traditional practice.

I’m 48 now and sometimes find it a drag. I can only wonder what it is that I’ll look back on from 58, or 68, or whatever, and think, “Well, drat, I wish I’d known that and incorporated it into my routine back in 2014.” (Or, for that matter, 2004, or 1984.)

But the alternative is to refuse to do the right thing in light of the evidence we have at any particular moment, and that sucks.

Ed Herdman – I’m no troll but you sure do a good impression of one. As a gay man, I’m not sure which is worst sometimes – the vitriol and hatred of the extreme right or the morally obtuse intellectual masturbation that constructivists like you engage in where you bloviate for several paragraphs, flirting with Regnerus while never quite distancing yourself from his junk science and then ending with a paeon to “sexual freedom” These cases have very little to do with sexual freedom – its extremely reductive to frame gay rights as sexual freedom. And frankly, the Queer Left has made same sort of cynical arguments against gay marriage but they frame it as selling out sexual radicalism for assimilation.

Salem – this thread has been hijacked by some many competing narratives that its almost impossible to tell who is arguing in good faith and who is just having a laugh. I resent Libertarians like Barnett attempting to hijack gay rights for some libertarian crusade against government regulation. Many have been uncomfortable with Kennedy’s gay rights jurisprudence and would prefer if he would return to a more traditional equal protection analysis.

Note to concern trolls/Libertarians- NO there isn’t a non-bigoted objection to gay rights.

” To believe that someone’s identity is inherently sinful is, to my mind, to be bigoted against them. If you believe black people are sinful and deserve fewer rights, you are racist. If you believe Jews are sinful and deserve fewer rights, you are anti-Semitic. I simply cannot see why those who believe that gays are sinful and deserve fewer rights should be held to a different standard.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/03/06/homophobia_bigotry_prejudice_conor_friedersdorf_calls_me_ignorant.html

I think somebody mentioned this already but most of the dictionary definitions of bigot/bigotry that I can find make no mention of hatred. It really means prejudiced or intolerant and as John pointed out, the original meaning is “religious hypocrite”.

There is a tendency to redefine such terms and to object when they are used correctly.

@ Prejudice and intolerance might be necessary conditions for being a bigot, but they aren’t sufficient. I had a religious studies teacher who loved to make the point that intolerance requires a disagreement, but his misinformed comments about Muslim belief made it clear that disagreement and intolerance aren’t always grounded in fact. In fact, the comments rose to the level of bigotry.

Yeah, it’s true, as far as it goes – which isn’t very far at all.

Ed – So, its basically it all boils down to you and your right to pontificate in CT comment threads? You sound like a libertarian alright… And you still have this creepy need to contrast gay rights vs childrens rights, which says alot about you….When you sound like a right wing homophobe, you might want to reevaluate your arguments.

“Societal interests.” That’s funny. Since when have we ever done anything with societal interests in mind? We do things with the interests of the ruling class in mind, only and always.

For instance, it’s obviously not in society’s best interests to ever allow large accumulation of personal wealth and power, but that’s the name of the game in America. It’s not in society’s interests to allow any pollution, any harmful substances, like BPA and its alternatives or 10,001 other things produced by the capitalist system in the name of profits over people. But we do. We the people don’t have a say in the matter under our economic system, because, uh, freedom.

So we fight these battles elsewhere, on civil rights, for instance, which takes us decades and decades and then it never seems to ever be resolved, as some new group of lunatics — almost always right-wing — emerges to bring forth their version of Jim Crow even though we thought we got rid of that once before. It never ends.

And this will keep on happening as long as we let the power of money, business, corporations, cartels substitute for democracy and democratic voices. This will keep on happening as long as we fool ourselves into thinking we’ve make this oh so smart bargain with business interests in which we let them do their thing in exchange for them taking good care of us.

We’ve been bamboozled.

So if it ever became a serious difficulty for white supremacists/Nazi’s to access service X, would it be justified to protect their rights through anti discrimination law ?

I don’t think so. Empirically, this is definitely wrong. As Corey has shown here repeatedly, communists were discriminated against, yet such protections never materialized.
Morally – and that may go counter to what CJColucci says – I believe there are good reason why political views are never included in anti-discrimination statutes, but I’ll admit I don’t have a well fleshed out theory on how exactly politics are different from classes that are protected.
Finally, remember there are limits to denying services, where a service is deemed essential so it would e.g. be illegal for airlines to refuse to transport neonazis (or communists). It’s certainly conceivable that our KKK friends would argue that copying is an essential service. Arguably the only copy shop in town could be considered such.

(e.g. infanticide)

Seriously?

I’m inclined to think that the idea is to ‘shame’ the traditional marriage advocate precisely because one thinks that the argument they offer ‘comes from a place’ (e.g. a mental or psychological state) of bigotry. That’s what justifies or motivates the name-calling.

It does come from a place of bigotry. People die over this stuff and you wanna split hairs and drink tea when it has absolutely nothing to do with your life except that it’s an opportunity to play the victim. Malice is utterly reasonable when you’re the person who doesn’t want other people to have rights. You should be ashamed.

Oh, and a thumbs-up to The Temporary Name, who has briefly said what I intended to. I just want to extend that by saying that not only is the gay rights angle critical, but the hair-splitting over “what’s good for kids” is actually counterproductive and in fact deadly there too.

@bxg

It’s pretty clear from the above that Mr Vinokurov, say, would answer that this is such a rare hypothetical that it is undeserving of an answer – we must wait until it’s a _real_ and pervasive problem which perhaps it isn’t (is that unfair?). So punt.

If the price of counteracting discrimination against LGBT people is that somewhere, someone will be obligated to print a poster they don’t like, I contend that as a society we should be willing to pay that price.

@adam.smith

I’m more interested in the general rules than JV and I do think there are some interesting questions at the margins, but I think the basic existing structure:
1. Businesses are not required to serve everyone
2. But they are not allowed to discriminate against a group classified by a protected class and
3. Their right to refuse service is severely curtailed if the service they offer is deemed essential
takes care of about 98% of all scenarios. The only real questions are what to do with the remaining 2% (the muslim cabbie, businesses that may be primarily religious institutions etc.) and what/who to classify as protected under 1. and as essential under 3.

I agree with this formulation. Of course there will always be corner cases; that’s just how rulemaking works. You think you’ve thought of everything and then some weird situation comes along and it turns out that your rule isn’t quite as airtight as you hoped it would be. What I’m saying is that this is ok. This is the normal way of things, and we should make peace with that. Legislating means, ideally, going through the process of reflective equilibrium: if we find that our rule has consequences we aren’t willing to tolerate, we amend it. We can take the first-order step in terms of anti-discrimination laws, and if that step somehow generates really unacceptable consequences, then we’ll talk about it. It turns out that we’ve already done this experiment once with racial discrimination, and the country didn’t fall apart, so I feel like I’m on solid ground in arguing that it won’t fall apart when we extend those protections to LGBT people.

@etv13

JanieM@65: Jerry “made a stab at it”? Jerry did no more than you did when you decided my question was too inane or complicated to bother with…. If you argue, as I gather you do, that sexual orientation should be a protected classification regardless of whether it’s innate or freely chosen, then I’m left wondering how to lawfully and honestly keep the KKK out of my (admittedly purely hypothetical) bakery.

I like it when the questions answer themselves. Your example is indeed to inane to bother taking seriously, but I’ll respond just as I did above: if the price of combating discrimination against LGBT people is that you have to sell a cake to the KKK, then that’s just how it is. But currently, the law actually allows you to refuse, if I understand CJColucci’s post correctly, so it’s a total non-issue that we don’t have to worry about.

@Aristodemus

They [people who oppose LGBT rights] have an argument that’s reasonably worth considering

No, they don’t. Let’s hit the empirical points first: there’s nothing to suggest that gay parents can’t raise children just as well as straight parents. Right off the bat that eliminates pretty much all the “empirical” arguments against gay rights, such as they are. What’s left behind is a bunch of handwaving bullshit about “natural complementarity” or “God says gays are icky.” Those are not assertions anyone should take seriously, and it’s just as well they don’t. Other than that, “traditional marriage advocates” (henceforth: bigots) have nothing to say, though they say it loudly. There literally exists not a single anti-SSM argument that’s worth consideration.

But that’s still not the major problem with the debate. The major problem is that you have a group of people who are demanding that other human beings justify their humanity. Same as it ever was: once upon a time, it was not considered enough for a black person or a Jew to simply say, “we are human and are entitled to human rights,” and now, it’s not enough for LGBT people to say the same. There is no “dialogue” possible with someone who refuses to accept your humanity. It doesn’t matter whether the challenge comes from a religious text or some kind of other philosophical foundations; any debate that starts with the premise that another human being is required to justify their own humanity is already worthless.

Regnerus seems sincere and not cynical

Do you send money to televangelists and fall easily for Craigslist scams?

Jeff McMahon and Peter Singer are prominent philosophers who defend infanticide, for different reasons and in different cases. There are numerous others.

The point is that many philosophical positions justify difficult-to-accept behaviors, activities, and policies. The challenge is to argue against these positions–not to offer ad hominem arguments and then attempt to defend the ad hominem as simply descriptive of the position you’re arguing against. This style of argument really is just rhetoric–which is to say that it’s not philosophical and it’s barely an argument–and it’s designed to shame and frighten rather than to engage. Ask yourself whether Socrates would’ve confronted an interlocutor in this manner, and then try to compare your own rhetoric to your answer.

That ‘people die over this stuff’ is perhaps the greatest reason to address the arguments as forthrightly and dispassionately, rather than as obliquely and rhetorically, as possible. That sort of engagement leaves room for your opponents to believe that you’re more interested in insulting and besmirching them than you are in discovering the truth, and thus it leaves them room not to have their minds changed. If some of us are ‘tea drinkers’, it is only because we treat the arguments, and their practical consequences, with the respect they deserve.

Jeff McMahon and Peter Singer are prominent philosophers who defend infanticide

Infanticide is very much like two boys kissing I suppose.

If some of us are ‘tea drinkers’, it is only because we treat the arguments, and their practical consequences, with the respect they deserve.

You are a bigot. It’s a matter of fact. That you are insulted by it is just so tragic, but is neither here nor there to the fact of it – it’s a word that means something! – or to the weakness of your argument. And aren’t you banned, Hector?

It’s nicer to think it is because there’d be less of him.

Jerry Vinokurov,

Which position in the ‘definition of marriage debate’ requires anyone to justify their humanity? I don’t know of an argument that claims that ‘gays aren’t human’, but I also don’t know of an argument which claims that ‘the ability/right to marry is a necessary condition to be human’.

I wouldn’t call natural law arguments or gender essentiality arguments ‘hand-waving bullshit’. At least, I don’t think of Peter van Inwagen, Alvin Plantinga, or Dean Zimmerman as hand-waving bullshitters. There’s also an interesting linguistic case to be made that we shouldn’t let voting (i.e. public opinion) change how words are defined; one can be an ‘equal-rights for LGBT’ advocate and still believe this position. Interesting, that is, to some people. But for you, it sounds like the question of whether someone is a bigot amounts to whether they can offer an argument that you find persuasive. Therefore, it seems, whether another person is a bigot has more to do with you than it has to do with the other person or the argument they make. This strikes me as exactly the sort of ‘bigotry’ or ‘prejudice’ you claim of your dissenters.

Every time I comment online I ask myself ‘what would Socrates do’

How the fuck did I let the opportunity pass by to point out that the “concern trolls” have successfully diverted the discussion from a possibly fruitful two-track discusion into useless shooting in a circle? Good goddamn, just talk about what you want to and leave the topic policing to Henry.

SoU-
Thank you. It’s kind of amusing to be called names by people who clearly don’t understand what you’re saying, or why you’re saying it, but it’s, in a virtual, internetty kind of way, spooky and discomfiting. Threatening even.
I get the impression that a few of the commenters here, if they knew where I lived, might be driven by their polarized antipathy to, you know, do something about it. Or if they had say a way to virtually, you know, monitor….aagh.
It’s okay to be mean to mean people.
It’s okay to hate on haters. Etc.
Scorn and contempt are always the signifiers.

i don’t know what “untried unproven ways of being” means in your post,

The quote. The science.
The fact that even now, early days, there is an arrogant crowing about the technologies and techniques of manipulation of the core machineries of biology, by ungoverned amoral, and limitlessly arrogant, power-mad priests of scientific triumphalism, to put it in polarizing terms, scares the shit out of me.
The blunder at the heart of anthropogenic climate forcing, and all the hideous damage next to and around that one principal fuckup, comes right out of that myopic dis-human attitude toward life. Control of vital things dimly understood in the most superficial ways.
What could go wrong? Oh let’s see…uhm… the weather, how bout?
The legitimate, morally near black and white, sense of victimhood from which these accusations of bigotry originate, is being played. My contention.
Used to keep the polarity decentered.
Evolution was like that ten years ago. The heat of the debate was obscuring the fact, the fact, the fact, that both sides were in favor of human control of human evolution. After millions of years of supra-human evolution gave us every thing we value about ourselves. Now we’re going to run it. Oh yeah dudes, you got it.
The center is life, the biological machinery, which is more and more in the hands of neo-humanoid weirdos.
With clear obvious consequences. Which are obscured behind these real but not central conflicts. because they’re personally central, and we live in a cultural moment when personal centrality is all there is.
Rufus Wainwright, a gay man with a husband, has a child with Leonard Cohen’s daughter. Good for them. And good will to them.
The cultural and societal environment that child is raised in is way more important than anything to do with Wainwright’s identification as a gay man.

but I also don’t know of an argument which claims that ‘the ability/right to marry is a necessary condition to be human’.

seriously? Then you haven’t actually spend as much time on this question as you would like everyone to think. Never heard or seen this one?

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival.

It’s, um, rather prominent in the debate…

The best (or worst) effort I ever saw at coming up with an objective argument against marriage equality that was not grounded in religion or “morality,” wound up going to what I thought was a very dark and scary place. The argument was essentially this:

1. Promoting the procreation of children is a compelling state interest; viz., the state has an interest in perpetuating itself through human reproduction.

2. An opposite-sex couple has the capacity to procreate; a same-sex couple does not. Therefore the the latter can never be considered “equal” to the former. The capacity to procreate makes the former “unique” and “special,” and therefore deserving of “special” treatment, “special” recognition, “special” privileges, and “special reward,” from the state.

3. In addition, since opposite-sex couples disproportionately bear the costs and burdens of child-bearing and child-rearing, they ought to be compensated for performing these services on behalf of the state and society.

4. Exclusive access to marriage (viz., reserving “married” / “spouse” status and all of the concomitant legal rights, benefits, privileges and immunities to opposite-sex couples only) is an appropriate “special” benefit / treatment / recognition / reward, and appropriate “compensation,” for opposite-sex couples’ uniqueness, and service to the state.

This person actually compared marriage to veterans’ benefits. Non-veterans are not considered “second class citizens” because they don’t have access to veterans’ benefits, therefore same-sex couples should not complain about being treated as “second class citizens” by not having access to marriage.

The whole thing was rather sickening, as you might imagine. But it shows what happens when you hate to try to defend the indefensible.

Temporary Name / Jerry Vinokurov, those are good questions. Yes, believe it or not, many people get emotional when kids or babies are mentioned; this is not psychologically improbable in the least. There is misinformation out there about what gay marriage and gay adoption means for kids and society. I am pretty sure that Regnerus believes that he’s doing the right thing “by the kids,” and also that he’s not thought hard enough to realize what a farce it is.

The more direct question, “how many units of challenge-answering are required,” has a couple possible responses:
a.) Post about what you want to;
b.) How much more profitable is it to just repeat truisms, like “gay people have rights?” (well, I never!);
c.) I have spent most of my time trying to correct etseq’s misplaced accusations of concern trolling (which are really just a tactical approach to the issue – burying it and harassing the messenger). If you want to preach to the choir, go find a choir. This is a blog where people try to, uh, talk about current issues in a philosophical way. If they like. I am willing to talk about different things, too!

Regnerus is arguably topical because the Michigan trial is happening right the fuck now; he just said those things and a bunch of people read his “concerns for children” in the Section A news.

@ MPAV

I’m more disappointed: Why would a daily forum contributor like yourself be naive and stupid enough to step in it once again? This isn’t the first time you’ve seen something like this happen, so don’t pretend that you’re not just lazily trolling. I’m OK with explaining to etseq two or three times while he tries to reorient himself from his own position (which is totally okay!) towards realizing I’m trying to blunder through a totally different kind of question here, at which point he can love it or leave it – at some point it became something else, a kind of “how dare you threaten to distract me from talking about what I want to talk about, on a public blog at that!” which is a totally nonsensical view. But yeah, it’s a blog, and people are going to talk about different things.

What exactly is the non-bigoted religious argument against SSM? About 200 comments into this thread, I regret to say I haven’t identified it.

Marriage is a civil right if I understand it correctly, and has been/ is in the process of being accorded to those of the same sex in the various U.S. states. I consider this right to encompass by definition all concomitant rights accorded married couples, including the right to a family.

Given that the particular family configuration currently seen as the standard in the developed West (nuclear, heterosexual) is not the only family configuration history has witnessed, and may not even be the most desirable for children – who actually appear to thrive in larger configurations, whether those of the extended family or even the clan – I am concerned about arguments that oppose SSM “for the sake of the children”.

Frankly, any argument that goes “I love my gay/lesbian friends/relatives/coworkers/acquaintances as individuals, but … ” is going to have to be very powerful to convince me that there is no emotional substrate informing what comes next.

I take seriously the maxim “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and consider that I am obligated to extend this maxim into the civil sphere, according my fellow-men the same rights I accord myself, including the right to a family – at least until such time as all human beings are required to pass a fitness examination for parenthood, and that time isn’t on the horizon, is it?

My point here isn’t to argue the case of the traditional marriage advocate. This has been done, influentially and strongly, by well-respected philosophers, and the citations are easily available.

The debate in this thread isn’t supposed to be about the soundness or validity of the traditional marriage position. It’s supposed to be about whether even the most dispassionate advocate of the traditional marriage position can correctly be called a “bigot” or a “homophobe”. Henry did not claim the following, but many in this threat have, and it is that the arguments offered by the traditional marriage advocate are so bad that the advocate is worthy of the labels “bigot” or “homophobe”. I claim, “The arguments don’t seem so obviously bad, given that they’ve been given prominent, persuasive defenses by people who were and continue to be respected philosophers.” You say, “No, even their arguments are so bad that the makers of them can be condemned as bigots and homophobes.”

So, there’s an impasse. My position isn’t to convince you that any traditional marriage advocate is giving a true argument; rather, my position is to convince you that at least some traditional marriage advocates give dispassionate, thoughtful, worthwhile arguments. And that they give those sorts of arguments precludes their being called bigots or homophobes. Well, what is the difference between a ‘worthwhile’ argument and a ‘non-worthwhile’ argument? A lot of that has to do with what you find rhetorically convincing or compelling, and now, the question of whether a traditional marriage advocate is a homophobe or bigot depends on how you find their argument – whatever that means.

This is not a recipe for successful communication. And indeed, as a principled way of considering which arguments one should consider and which are repugnant and ignorable, it is deeply subjectively-psychologically dependent. And worse, it’s going to end up being equally justifiable by your opponents–in which case, no one is going to end up convinced that anything the other side is saying is worth listening to, because you/we/I already have such a vested interest in dismissing arguments we disagree with without actively considering them; that is, we have such a vested interest in think that what we already believe is true that we’re not in the best psychological position to assess which arguments can be dismissed, and which holders of which positions can be condemned, out of hand.

What I’m trying to point out here isn’t whether the traditional marriage advocate has a ‘good’ argument. It’s that the rhetorical strategy of trying to justify ad hominem is a logical fallacy for a reason.

“This strikes me as exactly the sort of ‘bigotry’ or ‘prejudice’ you claim of your dissenters.”

Ah the old “I’m not a bigot you are” gambit. A little tired don’t you think?

Does someone want to take the trouble to explain to me why there isn’t a direct trade off between the rights of gay parents and the rights of bioparents? You either base the law on biology, or you base it on social links with the mother (child of the family provisions, step parental adoption, the presumption of legitimacy, etc). It seems clear that if you choose the first gay couples lose out, if you choose the second straight men lose out – which is why gay marriage advocates campaign for the second.

Maybe I’m confused, but I always thought “You’re a homophobic bigot; therefore, your argument sucks” was an ad hominem argument. Apparently, however, I got that wrong. If I understand Aristodemus correctly, the proper form of the ad hominem argument is: “Your argument sucks; therefore you’re a homophobic bigot.”

In the linguistic case, the claim is simply that we don’t vote or take a poll on the meaning of words, only because the relationship between meaning, concepts, and reality is so fraught. I mean, this really just is Philosophy of Language for the last fifty years, which has given us no settled conclusion on what language is, how its related to concepts, and how communication works.

Consider Putnam’s example of H2O and XYZ. Water has a chemical definition, H2O, that underwrites all of its functional instances. So, anytime you call some object water, you’re just calling it H2O. Suppose that a crazy religious legislature gained a majority and wanted to write a law asserting that holy water wasn’t H2O, but some supernatural compound. The chemical definition of holy water doesn’t change just because a legislature passed some law about the use of the word.

A similar reasoning applies to any other word. Unless the word is a legal-technical term, designed prohibitively as legal terminology, it’d be improper for a majority to change the definition. And that goes even for non-Natural Kind terms. We didn’t vote on the meaning of “road” or “book review”, and the words don’t change their meaning just because we voted for them to change their meaning. If that were so obviously and easily possible, why don’t we just vote to change the meaning of the N-word? A massive majority would support such a change. Then people could use it with impunity, because of course it wouldn’t be derogatory anymore.

Anyway, you could say, “I support equal rights for gays, and so I support the creation of an institution that’s open to all forms of sexual preference, that walks and talks like marriage but isn’t called ‘marriage’.” I’ve provided a decent summary of reasons why you might not favor calling these relationships marriages. How, exactly, could you consider a person who argued for something like this a bigot?

Wow…if anyone is still paying attention, this thread should be a classic study in concern trolling.

Concern trolls are a unique phenomenon because they are sophisticated enough to engage on the surface level but then spew out paragraph after paragraph of non-sequiturs, along with a nasty libertarian dudebro attitude. Eugene Volokh has made a career off being a professional concern troll – in fact, he has a special affinity for gay concern trolling with such classics as gays really are out to convert you, the gay slippery slope is real, and gay rights are a danger to god and country…

I’d suggest that anyone who hasn’t watched the video of Rory O’Neil aka Panti, do so for a reality check. The Catholic Church in Ireland is pushing back hard on gay marriage but I think they overplayed their hand by allowing the nuts at the Iona Institute to become the face of the Catholic Church on this one.

The entire “definition of marriage” argument is moronic, as is the term, “traditional marriage,” especially when used from a so-called “biblical perspective.”

Traditional marriage in the Levant of the time meant prearranged, without the consent of the girl, who was rarely “of age.” It also meant, among the rich, many wives, none of whom had any rights. Yes, this changed over time, through the centuries, and eventually became less barbaric. But even in America, we had laws on the books up until 1980 that said a husband could force his wife to have sex without her consent. As in, he could legally rape her and get away with it. “Traditional marriage” in short has a long history of atrocity, oppression of women and children, domestic violence and so on. And its “meaning” changed through time, and changed again and again.

Why anyone would cling to the belief that “the definition of marriage” — as they see it — must be protected defies all logic. It is solely a matter of emotional, irrational attachment to a myth — one that was never constant.

The “definition” was imposed on society, typically by wealthy men, by the ruling class of its day, without the participants having any say in the matter. Clinging to the ruling class’s version of anything, especially given its history, should be fought at every turn.

In short, F your definition of marriage.

“In short, F your definition of marriage.”
*Stands up and applauds!

I would be willing to concede that someone making the “marriage is about procreation” argument is genuinely not bigoted against LGBT people if I saw them making any real effort to deny non-reproducing opposite-sex couples the benefits of marriage. I’m not fussy about what that effort should be, either, since there are lots of fronts available. Fertility tests as a prerequisite for marriage? Reduction of tax breaks every N years without progeny? I dunno, really. All I ask for is a tiny fraction of the effort that we see channeled against same-sex couples put against opposite-sex couples who aren’t reproducing. Show me the effort, and I’ll grant the lack of homophobia.

Meanwhile, back in reality, so nearly as I can tell, this never, ever happens.

I’ll get back to Aristodemus’ nonsense later, but for now:

Let’s be honest here – how many people on CT had heard of Regnerus before this?

*raises hand*

Regnerus has been all over the goddamn internet with his “research” for years now. If you have some interest in the LGBT equality debate, you are more likely than not to have encountered his work.

Does someone want to take the trouble to explain to me why there isn’t a direct trade off between the rights of gay parents and the rights of bioparents?

Because it’s a product of your fevered imagination.

You either base the law on biology, or you base it on social links with the mother (child of the family provisions, step parental adoption, the presumption of legitimacy, etc).

“Biology” on its own counts for precious little. If all I do is donate a kidney, I don’t get a say in how the recipient lives their life; if all one does is donate genetic material, then there’s not a lot to commend them as parents. Luckily, we don’t have to choose between those two things, we can take both into account. It’s just that when it comes down to it, the welfare of the actual child would be paramount. I don’t see how that’s supposed to somehow be injurious to straight parents who are, you know, actually parenting.

It seems clear that if you choose the first gay couples lose out, if you choose the second straight men lose out – which is why gay marriage advocates campaign for the second.

Right, The Gays are deliberately trying to undermine straight men by campaigning for the welfare of the child to be taken into account in custody situations, as though this wasn’t already the case long before SSM even became a thing. Lose the tinfoil hat.

@Bruce,

The reason we don’t see the same kind of effort directed against non-procreative hetero couples, I think, is that a lot of this is about controlling thought and perception. Preventing non-procreative people from marrying is not the point; preventing people from thinking, believing or perceiving that “marriage” means, can mean, or should mean, anything other than what exclusivists think it means, and want everyone else to think it means, is the point. Wanting marriage to be that one particular thing, is the point. Seeing a non-procreative opposite-sex couple get married doesn’t undermine those thoughts and perceptions. Seeing a married same-sex couple does.

The fact that same-sex couples “can’t procreate” (which is not true, since they can procreate with the aid of a third party) is just a brick in the wall, so to speak. It’s not a legal justification; it’s a justification for maintaining an abstract perception.

@CJColucci:

I don’t know what you mean by this:

So now they’re stuck with marriage in fact and name, and whine for the alternative they never would have accepted.

Who are “they”? Who do you hear/read “whin[ing] for the alternative” and what does that look/sound like? I don’t hear the gay community, or non-gay advocates of equality, “whining” for anything, let alone any separate-but-equal domestic status for gay couples. So I’m not sure what you’re talking about here.

Graf — I took CJColucci to mean that it’s the other side that’s whining because the gays allegedly wouldn’t accept civil unions.

*raises hand*

Regnerus has been all over the goddamn internet with his “research” for years now. If you have some interest in the LGBT equality debate, you are more likely than not to have encountered his work.

word. And not just his work, but also the numerous rebuttals of it, including the SSR audit demolishing the paper and the Slate (Slate!) takedown of Regnerus etc. So the whole “I’m doing a public service by taking him seriously and providing measured counter-arguments” is a little late.

Graf — I agree it’s not clear, but I just think that CJC was being careless with pronouns in that paragraph.

Here’s my gloss:

Although I had no objection to same-sex marriage, I thought there was a deal to be had creating a legal status with the substance but not the name of marriage, and that advocates of same-sex marriage ought to take it. … But whatever the abstract merits of the case, there wasn’t anyone on the other side of the table [for the advocates of same-sex marriage] to make that deal with. So now they’re [the “advocates” of “traditional marriage” you mentioned in the comment CJColucci is responding to] stuck with marriage in fact and name, and whine for the alternative they never would have accepted.[because they were never on the other side of the table willing to negotiate about civil unions when it might have mattered] Cue the violins.

Hopefully CJC will come along in person and clarify.

Not as familiar with Inwagen or Zimmerman, but Alvina Plantinga probably falls to the level of hand-waving bullshit (cf. http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/is-alving-plantinga-for-real-alas-it.html). Along with quite a bit of philosophy of (mostly Christian) religion, as far as I can tell. Certainly sometimes religious thinking about concepts that are at bottom not especially or uniquely religious gets us to some interesting places, but all the tarted up apologetic and theodicy stuff is, well… it is what it is: more or less the exemplar of hand-waving bullshit, whether it’s from Descartes, Kant, and Hegel or Inwagen, Plantinga, and Zimmerman.

Sorry for the sloppy pronouns. JanieM’s translation is spot on.

@Jerry Vinokurov: Despite there being a real-life case in New Mexico and all, I’m not so sure the KKK case is a lot less unlikely than gay people wanting to give their business to a bigoted photographer or baker. Aren’t they worried about screwed-up exposures, or spit in the batter? I sure would be. Anyway, I think it’s a cop-out to say “This is so improbable it’s not worth troubling about,” and once you’ve said that, I can’t take your further conclusions seriously.

I think sexual orientation is more like race or gender than it is like political beliefs, so if I ask myself, “Would you support this if it were based on race or gender?” and the answer is “No,” then I tend to think the New Mexico court got it right. But to the extent that someone like JanieM argues that sexual orientation is closer to political beliefs or other chosen actions, then I have doubts. I think people ought to be able to choose not to do business with people whose freely chosen actions or beliefs are abhorrent to them, at least in arenas where those choices are directly implicated — i.e., catering a Klan event as opposed to selling groceries to someone who happens to be a Klan member. I don’t think opening a bakery obligates you to bake a “Happy Birthday Nathan Bedford Forrest” cake, or a wedding cake for the guy who broke your heart in high school, or just anyone else who slaps $200 bucks down on your counter. I think we can draw principled distinctions, and we should, and not just throw up our hands and say, “This will never happen, so it’s not worth thinking about.”

Ze Kraggash, that’s both ridiculous and wrong.

Ridiculous, because homophobes are always going to find grounds for objection and distancing, because they’re homophobes (until they stop being so). When the problem is that gay people are abnormal, unnatural, and wrong, whatever they do will seem abnormal, unnatural, and wrong. That’s not something the rest of us can fix.

Wrong, because all you have to do is look around at how people generally talk about it. Celebrities like George Takei and Ellen Degeneres aren’t “gay-married”; they’re married. They had to wait to get married, but then they got married. They have a husband or wife as appropriate. Institutions like the Defense Department provide spousal benefits, not “gay-spousal” benefits. There are no “gay-marriage” certificates, just marriage certificates. When I’m in an environment to hear some random chatter about folks’ friends, colleagues, etc., getting married, I simply don’t hear this “gay-married” stuff at all.

It looks to me like you’ve built an eidolon of “the public’s mind” that’s more interesting to you than reality.

Everything is the same (well, except for the configuration of genders), and yet they are different lexical concepts.

I’m reminded of the catholic position on transubstantiation. Only backwards: the accidents change, while the substance remains the same.

Ineffable, truly.

“modern marriage,” “interracial marriage,” “common law marriage,” “gay marriage,” “second marriage,” “interfaith marriage,” “marriage of convenience,” “arranged marriage”… — there are a lot of different marriages and different people have different value judgments about them and that’s OK(ish). But legally and in the eyes of the state they’re all the same “marriage”, which is the point of equality. And, as Bruce says, for the most part for the people involved they’re also just “marriage”.

Another “yes, and” reply to Jerry. :) As follow-up to the well-phrased “People who think that you can immediately create the perfect legislation that covers every corner case are either simply delusional, or they’re actually concern-trolling to prevent the passage of legislation that would address 99% of the cases.”, I note that there’s one side in the argument over marriage equality that believes in appointing good judges and paying the expenses of a well-run judicial system that can deal with the inevitable corner cases. It’s not the homophobic side, where we find a bunch of the same leaders and prominent activists also trying to keep the judicial system under-staffed, under-funded, and tied up as many ways as possible.

However much we talk about issues independently of each other, the fact is that in practice, laws and regulations are made and implemented by people. It’s always worth looking at what else someone pushing for a particular issue is in favor of, particularly when they’re also playing a prominent part in pushing for others – raising money, coordinating efforts, campaigning for office on a stance about them, and so on. There’s nobody prominent on the pro-bigotry side who’s in favor of good government, in the sense of having well-written laws, regulations sensibly derived from them and updated regularly in response to changing conditions, accurate data about what conditions are, well-compensated employees with sufficient resources to perform their jobs well, hiring and firing and promotion related to performance of job duties as opposed to partisan toadying, stable sources of revenue, responsible accounting for expenses, and all the rest. Not a one. They’re all on the side of hustlers, crooks, kooks, fanatics, and other moral low-lifes.

That matters. It’s right that we take it into account. There are people arguing in favor of marriage equality that I dislike and whose policies I’d prefer not to see prevail, but there’s not a single prominent opponent of marriage equality that I can find who shows any scrap of caring about basic civic virtues.

The lawyers can correct me if I’m wrong, but I would add that U.S. anti-discrimination laws as they already exist don’t depend on the distinction etv13 is making so much of (whether something is inborn or chosen). That’s a big reason why I declined to bite this hook in the first place: because it had (and has) all the feeling of a manufactured red herring in a game of gotcha. “Oh, you don’t believe ‘it’s inborn’ is a good argument? Then bam, you’re in trouble, and I’m cleverly going to show you why.”

Except that I’m not in trouble (at least not for that reason), because the law already doesn’t make anything of that distinction, so I’m not losing anything if I refuse to rely on it.

Furthermore:

If a principled distinction based on inborn vs. chosen characteristics is so important, then what the heck is “the guy who broke your heart in high school” doing on a list of people you might want the right not to do business with?

As for inborn qualities, here’s a good example of the sword cutting both ways.

Bottom line, if etv13 wants a principled distinction based on something s/he feels is important and I don’t, then etv13 can do the homework; I have my own agenda to attend to. There’s plenty of material even in this comment thread about how anti-discrimination law really evolved — e.g. in relation to groups that have historically been discriminated against, and not in relation to inborn-ness — and how complex the subject is (see CJC, JV, and others). For anyone who cares, two books that taught me a lot about the subject (including how irrelevant my own untutored assumptions were) are Same-Sex Marriage and the Constitution, by Evan Gerstmann, and Liberty and Sexuality, by David Garrow.

*****

Cannolis for everybody. I’ll go along with that. :-)

agree with JanieM that “born this way” isn’t particularly helpful or necessary. A lot of things that we do want to discriminate against likely have a genetic component (psychopathy, for a start). And, of course, religion, which has always been a protected class, has very little to do with genes (religiosity as a trait probably does, but which religion you end up with almost certainly doesn’t).
So the reason we want to treat sexual orientation differently from political beliefs needs to come from something else. I’m not 100% sure what that is, but one thought is that other people’s politics affect you much more than other people’s religion: If someone prays to god, the FSM, or not at all makes no difference to a third party. If someone pressures the government to spend more money on tanks and less money on schools it most certainly does.

Speaking of “born this way,” there’s a conservative take on doing away with “orientation” as a reified distinction over at First Things. Of course, the author would like to do so because he’d also like us to go back to the days when masturbation was considered a mortal sin, and much other nonsense besides, but I thought it was interesting to see a conservative trying to outflank mainstream liberalism on the left.

Graf, thanks.

You write, they actually specify which characteristics may not be the basis of discrimination (e.g., “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1)). The underlying principle…is that it’s unfair and unlawful to discriminate based on a characteristic that a person cannot help having, and cannot simply voluntarily change.

The list does not fit the principle. Religious beliefs are a choice, not “a thing that a person cannot help having.” (The fact that religion is mentioned in the Bill of Rights and the other thigns aren’t doesn’t matter if we’re talking about abstract principles we’d like to see implemented.)

One reason I still don’t want to rely on the “inborn” distinction is precisely, as I said above, that if I’m thinking about general principles, I don’t want to be subject to discrimination because my actions (or imagined actions) violate someone else’s religious beliefs. I don’t believe a landlord should be able to turn me away because I might “commit sins” on her property. Let her worry about her own damned sins; mine are none of her business. To me, that’s part of what the shared public realm means, or should mean, in a diverse society.

@JanieM,

There’s a fine distinction to be made between the term “religion” as set forth in the statute, and the term “religious beliefs” as used here.

“Religion” refers to a person being Jewish, or being Catholic, or being Rastafarian, not to the conscious choice to entertain specific articulable thoughts that constitute “religious beliefs.”

Now, I agree wholeheartedly that religion is in every conceivable respect a choice; it’s just as much a choice to “be Jewish” as it is to believe that one must keep kosher for Passover. But the rationale behind the inclusion of “religion” in the list of characteristics that cannot be the basis of discrimination, includes inter alia the fact that being (or self-identifying as) of a particular religion does not necessitate harboring any particular thought or belief. A person in a position to discriminate, such as an employer or a merchant, cannot assume that I “believe” any particular thing just because I “am Jewish.” He also can’t assume that I am Jewish (let alone believe any particular thing) because, e.g., my last name is Goldstein.

I suppose, also, that “religious liberty” includes the right to believe that one cannot voluntarily change one’s religion, and cannot pick and choose which religious tenets to follow and which to disregard. It’s the kind of thing we can’t (or shouldn’t) require people to change or give up if they want to avoid discrimination.

I think sexual orientation might fall into that category as well. Even if it is a “choice,” even if it can be changed or disavowed, a person shouldn’t have to do that in order to avoid discrimination. Now, of course, if we add that additional caveat (viz., characteristics that a person cannot change or discard, or should not be compelled to change or discard), there may be other things that people should not be required to change or discard in order to be employed or served without discrimination. The key is not so much identifying what they are but finding an organizing principle to distinguish what is from what isn’t in that category.

The underlying principle, to put in in somewhat over-simplified layman’s terms, is that it’s unfair and unlawful to discriminate based on a characteristic that a person cannot help having, and cannot simply voluntarily change.

So, you think someone cannot change her religion? That is not a minor quibble. People should be free to choose and exercise their religious beliefs, if any, and not suffer public regulation or opprobrium. Similarly, people should be free to make sexual relationship choices, which are intimate and extremely personal. I presume when people make the point that it is “not a choice” they can be making the point that sexual expression can go to the core of a person’s being and identity, and making appropriate choices is central to protecting that core — they are not conceding that it is OK to restrict choices of such an intimate nature as sexual identity or religious spirituality.

I think your interpretation misses a couple of other key points about the shape of the law in this area.

First, the statute identifies a universal, not a peculiar characteristic, and, on its face, protects everyone, not just a subset of the population. Everyone has a race. Everyone has a sexual orientation. Everyone has a religion, even, for the purposes of the statute (– it would be illegal to discriminate against atheists or agnostics).

Arguments with bigots often turn on the bigots perverting or denying this universalism — the bigots will claim that a particular group is specially privileged by anti-discrimination legislation. This can be a critical political frontier in the struggle to achieve or maintain civil rights. But, it is the essence of bigotry to establish a hostility between an in-group versus an out-group, with an eye to protecting the privilege of one, or protesting the (supposedly wrongly assigned) privilege of the other.

The second point is that the law is informed by history. These universals are chosen for these enactments, because we have had experience with the pernicious effects of social conflict, oppression and injustice built on principles of discrimination. There’s a history of horrendous racial oppression. There’s a history of religious wars. There’s a history of cruelty and caste regarding sexuality and sexual orientation.

Forgetting history is a second frontier in arguments with bigots. The bigots will always want to forget history, or to deny that effects of that history are still with us. They will attempt to use universal principles to protect their right to discriminate, humiliate and denigrate, and to recreate the in-group privilege and out-group oppression that is their political desiderata. The racialists will argue that prohibitions on racial or ethnic discrimination make efforts at diversifying college admissions or police forces or other workplaces, illegal, for example. (David Bernstein, George Mason University and Volokh Conspiracy, has made a career out of these kinds of arguments.)

In this context, “traditional marriage” is an exercise in forgetting history. Actual historic marriage, only as long ago as, say, 1950, was quite a different institution from marriage in 21st century America, embedded in a web of sexual repression and control, which the Sexual Revolution overthrew. 21st century marriage is not a license for sexual intercourse in anyone’s concept, but that’s exactly what it was, legally, in 1950 America. In the new concept, marriage is a nearly entirely private matter of a committed, continually voluntary relationship, and excluding perfectly legal sexual relationships from marriage makes no sense — reason immediately recognizes the senseless of discrimination in this matter. But, that’s because we no longer make adultery or fornication or masturbation a matter of the criminal law, nor do we make sodomy a more serious crime than arson; a big-city mayor would not initiate his re-election campaign with raids on gay bars or having the police beat up transvestites in the streets; we don’t prohibit birth control (or at least, not most means). Etc.

I have no doubt that there are many people of good will, who find in their subjective reactions, some un-thought-out impulse of . . . I don’t know . . . discomfort or disgust, with the idea of gay marriage, and they seek to rationalize or justify those feelings, as humans are wont to do. But, there are also committed bigots, who have an agenda of bigotry, who want to re-create the evils of the past. There are white supremacists, still. And, people, who want to prohibit abortion, and birth control, and put women into a subordinate roles, etc. We shouldn’t let the bigots disguise themselves, with a forgetfulness of history and experience.

@253 Meh…That article is much like the comments in this thread – it’s a sophisticated version of concern trolling i.e., its written in as pastiche of the worst of Foucauldian post-structuralism – a bit of anti-foundationalism here and bit of social constructionism there – but the trolling comes at the end with the big reveal – after he has dissolved all the folk essentialism that gives rise to the modernism we take for granted, he then reverts back to pre-modern natural law to anchor his morality, which is completely contradicts everything he wrote up to that point. Who does he hope to convince with such a bait and switch? Not the traditionalists who never accepted modernism to begin with, nor the post-modernists who may agree with his criticisms of modernism but have no desire to return to the pre-modern repression of traditional religion. The only audience I can see who takes him seriously are a few cynical queer theorists who cling to some rose colored nostalgia for a non-existent sexual nirvana that supposedly existed prior to the “creation” of modern sexual categories. For those few “idealists” who think that the abjection of the closet was superior to our modern politics of equality, then they are free to ally themselves with repressive religion in some bizarre gambit to turn the clock back. I know of one “radical” law professor who hates the concept of gay marriage so much that he actually published a law review article proposing an alliance between radical “queers” (as far as I can tell he definition of “queer” is so extreme that Judith Butler and he are basically the only people who fits) and fundamentalist religions, including ex-gay therapists who he seems to think shares his desire to “abolish” modern sexual categories. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1677934.

Does anyone talk this stuff seriously? Who knows – maybe concern trolling is an viable strategy for academic careerism but for quotidienne politics? Not so much…

@Bruce W.:

So, you think someone cannot change her religion?

Of course someone can change her religion.

I think your interpretation misses a couple of other key points about the shape of the law in this area.

Which is why I qualified it as an “over-simplified” expression made in “layman’s terms,” not an “interpretation.”

In this context, “traditional marriage” is an exercise in forgetting history.

I like to think of it as an exercise in thought control, but that’s really the same thing.

I should have said that I surf the web in general (not just CT) in Firefox with scripts turned off. If there’s something I particularly want to see/hear, I open IE and look at it there. Keeps the clutter and nonsense at bay.

I suspect that the reason behind what classes our antidiscrimination laws protect is not a general principle, although most of the classes, except religion, would comfortably fit into the “born this way” theory and you could craft an explanation for religion based on its being, if not inborn, at least very hard to change. I suspect, though, that the classes we select for protection are selected for us by the discriminators themselves: religion gets protected because enough people discriminate against, say, Jews, to make it a big enough problem to address; politics does not get protected because not enough people discriminate against, say, Republicans to make it a big enough problem to address.

politics does not get protected because not enough people discriminate against, say, Republicans to make it a big enough problem to address.

see, but I’m not convinced that’s the case. I mean – it’s obviously true for mainstream politics, but you can’t tell me that discrimination against communists hasn’t been pretty significant. There were employment blacklists, after all. Obviously that doesn’t mean there’s a good principle, it could just be that protection of religion is much more deeply rooted in US history than that of political views.
But I still wonder if there isn’t actually something that does distinguish the two.

Religion is protected, politics isn’t. I think that’s right, but I’m not entirely sure why. Are you saying it isn’t?”

Am I saying what isn’t what?

Irrespective of what you or I think, “politics” is not enumerated amongst the protected classes or characteristics in the Civil Rights Act. “Religion” is. (Bear in mind also that the Civil Rights Act only prohibits employment discrimination.) The Supreme Court’s Equal Protection and Due Process jurisprudence recognizes neither religion nor politics as a protected class; religion is protected separately by the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment.

Refusing to serve a Klansman because he is a Klansman is not the same as refusing to serve a gay person because he is gay. What’s the difference? We could spend all day listing the differences between a generic Klansman and a generic gay person, and the justifications for refusing to do business with one and the other.

Let me introduce The Trolley Problem.

Scenario 1: Trent is the driver of a runaway trolley, that through no fault of his own is careening down the tracks out of control. There are three workmen on the track up ahead who cannot be warned in time to get out of the way. If Trent throws a switch, he can divert the trolley onto a side track where there is only one workman, who also cannot be warned. Trent throws the switch, and the trolley kills the one workman on the side track, sparing the other three.

Scenario 2: Dave is a doctor with three terminally-ill patients in his office ward, each in need of an organ transplant. A healthy patient comes in for his annual check-up. Dave anesthetizes the patient, harvests his organs and gives them to the three ward patients, saving their lives.

Now, the proper result in each case, at first blush, is obvious: Trent did the right thing, Dave did not. Trent’s action is not and should not be punishable by law, Dave’s is, and should be. But when you start to examine their actions, the choices they made and the reasons why they made those choices, the similarities overwhelm the differences. Trent and Dave both effectively made the same choice for the same reasons with the same outcome, yet one is regarded as a hero and the other as a murderer. Not only are we OK with what Trent did, but we would want anyone in Trent’s position to do the same thing. Not only are we not OK with what Dave did, we don’t want anyone else to ever do that.

The question is, why? And the reason for asking why is not to suggest that either outcome is wrong, that the outcome should be the same in both cases, or to advocate on either Trent or Dave’s behalf. Why is society willing to tolerate what Trent did, but not what Dave did? (Or, conversely, why is society willing to punish Dave, but not punish Trent?)

I think simple fear (and the use of “security of the country / military necessity”) and unknown quantities could explain discrimination against groups which can be portrayed (however disingenuously) as arrayed against the country’s interests. Somebody who actually does want to overthrow the legal order, like KKK members or GL Rockwell’s Nazis, well you might see them down at the trading station, so let’s give ’em a pass.

Aside from being centered at the edge, if not in the heart of the South, Washington D.C. society in the era of HUAC doesn’t seem to have been flooded with real communists (how many communists were there in the area)? The old boys’ consensus about dealing with blacks started to crumble, but communists have apparently remained sufficiently exotic in the corridors of power to continue to be an easy target for Othering even today.

Also, Plantinga. Hahahah. I can only read a few paragraphs about Plantinga at a time before twitching…holy crap. But still not as crazy as that guy etseq linked to, who apparently is the person Alex had in mind way upthread talking about gay supremacists. Saying that gays should enter an alliance with ex-gay therapists…gives me another chance to mention that Chappelle Show skit about the “blind black white supremacist.”

@Graf – obviously the Trolley problem doesn’t need introduction on this blog… but even for the significantly more hypothetical Trolley problem, the point of the different scenarios is to, in the wise words of Wikipedia “find a relevant moral distinction between the two cases.” and so given that at least for me (and I’m still not entirely sure what you actually think) it _is_ OK to discriminate against the Klansman (but not the gay man), I’m trying to figure out what the exact nature of that moral distinction is.

You propose as an answer ” unfair and unlawful to discriminate based on a characteristic that a person cannot help having, and cannot simply voluntarily change.” in @254 and then try to explain how that applies to religion in @257. I then say that I’m unconvinced that you can use this to distinguish between religion and politics — and from that point I honestly don’t understand what you’re arguing anymore. If you could rephrase what you’re trying to say in 262 and 271 that would help. To restate what I don’t understand is
1. Do you think there should be a ban on discrimination based on politics?
2. If you don’t think there should be such a ban, by what organizing principle do you distinguish deeply held religious beliefs from deeply held political beliefs.

oversimplified, if you’re an ordinary government employee, say a cop or a doctor in a public hospital or an accountant in the tax department, you can’t lose your job because of your political affiliation.

One over-simplification I think is key is that you CAN be not considered for hire for reasons that are closely related to political affiliation, in ways that would be sharply illegal if applied to race or gender.

1. Do you think there should be a ban on discrimination based on politics?

No.

2. If you don’t think there should be such a ban, by what organizing principle do you distinguish deeply held religious beliefs from deeply held political beliefs.

The question makes no sense, because the answer to (1) does not require a distinction between “deeply held religious beliefs” and “deeply held political beliefs.”

[I think we’ve also lost sight of the fact that in this context, “deeply-held religious beliefs” are being used as a sword rather than a shield, to excuse, justify or grant permission for discrimination rather than protect the holder from discriminatory treatment, but that’s not really relevant now as we’re only talking about them as a shield at this point.]

I did not “propose as an answer” to this or anything else by stating that it is “unfair and unlawful to discriminate based on a characteristic that a person cannot help having, and cannot simply voluntarily change.” (Which it is.) I was attempting to explain — in a highly over-simplified 35,000-foot-high-level-abstract fashion — the principle underlying the inclusion of enumerated categories (expressio unius est exclusio alterius) set forth in anti-discrimination statutes such as Title VII, and “protected classes” under the Supreme Court’s Equal Protection and Due Process jurisprudence. I.e., the reason why some specific enumerated human characteristics are singled out in law as being an improper basis for discriminatory treatment — which itself is not, in and of itself, unfair or unlawful.

Of course, the “immutable characteristic” aspect doesn’t end the inquiry, as several others have pointed out. It could be argued that religion, unlike race and gender, is not an “immutable characteristic” — but then again it could be argued that race and gender are not immutable characteristics either, since they can at least outwardly be “changed.” But the fact that a characteristic is not necessarily immutable does not necessitate that it be removed from the list. The analysis then shifts from immutable characteristics, things a person cannot change or abandon, to characteristics that a person should not be compelled or required to change or abandon in order to avoid discriminatory treatment.

The problem with the phrase “should not” is that it implies at least some level of subjective moral judgment. We should not punish Trent for killing the one track workman; Dave should not be at liberty to harvest a healthy patient’s organs.

The ultimate point is that the fact that the answer to the question of whether it is OK for [X] to discriminate against [Y], to mistreat [Y], inflict economic harm upon [Y], to effectively punish [Y] for being [Y], might be different depending on what [Y] is, does not invalidate the entire premise of discrimination. It is neither inconsistent nor hypocritical to answer no if [Y] is gay, and yes if [Y] is a member of a political hate group, or beats his wife, or has bad breath.

[I]t _is_ OK to discriminate against the Klansman (but not the gay man), I’m trying to figure out what the exact nature of that moral distinction is.

The answer lies in the answer to the Trolley Problem.

The answer lies in the answer to the Trolley Problem.

Oh, cut the condescension. You’re not my highschool teacher. If you think there is a clear answer, spell it out, don’t turn it into a Socratic guessing game.

It is neither inconsistent nor hypocritical to answer no if [Y] is gay, and yes if [Y] is a member of a political hate group, or beats his wife, or has bad breath.

I’m not interested in labeling anyone as hypocritical nor in invalidating the premise of discrimination(???). I’m interested in getting sexual orientation recognized as an enumerated protected class across the board (as opposed to the patchwork we have now that leaves it out where its most needed) and for that reason I’m interested in formulating the best set of arguments of why it should be. Obviously I know that better arguments don’t win political fights, but they may help a little.

So let’s take this:

the fact that the answer to the question of whether it is OK for [X] to discriminate against [Y][…] might be different depending on what [Y] is

That’s obviously true. But if we have a debate as a society about which Ys should be shielded against discrimination some clear rules on how to identify them might help. (CJColucci disagrees – they think it should be handled pragmatically where needed. I can respect that as a view, but I don’t find it convincing). And I’m entirely unsure where you’re going with the “The problem with the phrase “should not” is that it implies at least some level of subjective moral judgment.” This sounds like you want to leave this to the subjective moral judgment of…the majority?…decent people? But surely that can’t be right.

@adam.smith:

Let’s also be clear about what a, quote, “ban on discrimination” actually is. I think a lot of misunderstanding about this issue comes from a fundamental failure to understand exactly how we, quote, “ban” discrimination, in part because of all the focus on what should be, quote, “banned” and why.

Discrimination is not a crime. It has never been a crime, never will be a crime, and no one with any influence is suggesting or advocating that it should be a crime. No one has ever gone, and no one will ever go, to prison, or even on probation, as a result of having discriminated against an employee or a customer (including a potential employee or customer). No one has ever been stopped, arrested, detained, or questioned by police for discriminating against an employee or a customer. No one has ever been issued a ticket or citation, nor has anyone ever paid, nor will anyone ever pay, one single dollar in fines to the federal government, nor to any state or local government, as punishment for discriminating against an employee or customer.

Discrimination is not a crime, a misdemeanor, a violation, or a civil offense. It might be a tort, it might be a breach of contract, but it’s not precisely either of those.

What it is is the subject of a private civil cause of action that is expressly authorized by statute. In other words, the legislature provides that a person can sue an employer, commercial actor, or other person or entity who is in a position to discriminate, for damages caused by the discriminatory treatment on the basis of race, gender, religion, national origin, age, sexual orientation, or whatever other improper basis are set forth in the statute.

Because it is a private civil cause of action, the plaintiff (i.e., the accuser) bears the burden of proving that (1) he was treated in a discriminatory fashion, (2) the treatment was substantially motivated by his membership in one of the enumerated categories, and (3) he suffered economic harm as a result.

What all this means is that the law does not actually, quote, “ban” discrimination at all. What it does is allow individuals to enforce their right to equal or non-discriminatory treatment, within the legal/statutory definitions thereof. To the extent the discriminatory treatment is not set forth in the statute, the victim can still sue (under a tort or contract theory), but again this does not constitute a “ban” on discrimination so much as a right of action to redress whatever economic harms it causes.

If anything, anti-discrimination statutes and common-law doctrines impose a legal duty on employers and commercial actors to treat employees and customers in a non-discriminatory fashion. When they discriminate, they run the risk of breaching that duty and causing economic harm to the counterparty, for which the law will hold them accountable — if that breach of duty, causation and damages can be proven. As in all other situations, the actor has to decide if the behavior is worth the risk of being successfully sued for any economic harms his behavior inflicts on others.

Imposing a legal duty with respect to a certain behavior is not the same as “banning” that behavior. Discrimination is not “banned” in this country; we have a legal duty to treat others fairly. There’s a difference.

@Graf – I do understand the basics of anti-discrimination law, thanks. I use “ban” as a shorthand the same way much of the media does. I don’t see how that changes anything, though.

If you think there is a clear answer, spell it out, don’t turn it into a Socratic guessing game.

OK, OK. No condescension intended; just busy with other things and trying to save time. I don’t necessarily think there is a clear answer, but here goes:

The Trolley Problem illustrates that two identical choices made for the same reason with the same result under different circumstances can properly have two very different legal and moral outcomes for the actors making those choices. Where saving three lives at the expense of one was the proper moral outcome in one scenario, it was not the proper moral outcome in the other, hence the legal outcomes are properly different. The distinctions lie not in the choices the actors made, but in the surrounding circumstances, the people affected by those choices, and how society as a whole incentivizes, encourages, and discourages behavior.

Working on the railroad is a dangerous job. But it’s a job that society needs and wants people to be willing to do. We want people to do dangerous jobs; we want people to take the kinds of risks that Trent and the track workmen were taking by going to work every day in the train yard. In other words, we want people to be willing to work on the railroad; we want them to voluntarily take the risk of being run over by a runaway train, and we want them to take the risk of being at the controls when a train gets out of control, having to make that kind of decision, and we want them to minimize harms however they can.

By contrast, a doctor’s office is not supposed to be a dangerous place for people who go in there voluntarily for treatment. A person going to the doctor should not be at risk, and should not have to bear the risk, of being carved up by a physician to be an involuntary organ donor. We want people to be healthy; we want them to go to the doctor, and not just when they’re sick, hence we don’t want them to fear for their lives if and whenever they do.

In short, we want people to go to work on the railroad knowing they might not come home alive, but we don’t want people to go to the doctor’s office knowing they might not come home alive. We’re willing to put railroad workers at risk in ways we’re not willing to put patients at risk.

Now, recall:

Is “being a Lutheran” the kind of thing we should compel or require someone to change or discard in order to avoid discriminatory treatment?

Is “being a Klansman” the kind of thing we should compel or require someone to change or discard in order to avoid discriminatory treatment?

Remember that discrimination is a private civil cause of action, not something that is “banned” by law. It’s the individual’s job to enforce his right to be treated fairly; he can choose to do that, or he can choose to change the characteristic or behavior that motivates the unfair treatment. If he can’t do the former, he can only do the latter. If we don’t allow him to sue (or if his suit does not succeed), then there is at least an element of society telling him that he should change if he wants to avoid the unfair treatment.

So, do we want to make people change their religion? Do we want to tell people they have to stop being Lutheran?

Do we want to tell people they have to stop being Klansmen?

I think a moral argument could be made that the answer to the former question is no, and the latter question is yes. I think one could make the case that society as a whole would want to encourage religious affiliation, or even perhaps be indifferent thereto, but would want to discourage membership in violent racist hate groups. I think there’s a difference between saying to a person, “If you want equal treatment, stop being a Lutheran,” and “If you want equal treatment, stop being a Klansman.”

So, where does “If you want equal treatment, stop being gay” fall into this spectrum? Can society ask, require or compel a person to “stop being gay” in like fashion? Assuming it could, would society want to discourage people from being gay, in the same sense it would want to discourage people from joining racist hate groups?

I think the answer to both of these last two questions is “no.” But not everyone would agree.

@etv13,

Thanks; I’ll look into that. If there are statutes in other states that I’m not aware of that impose criminal penalties for discrimination, then I stand corrected. But authorizing special damages in a civil lawsuit or administrative proceeding is not the same thing as levying fines for criminal misconduct.

adam.smith@286: Here’s what the treatise I consulted (Wilcox, California Employment Law) has to say about that, in its sections on what you can inquire about in a job interview: “Inquiries regarding an applicant’s membership in organizations and non-work activities can lead to claims of discrimination. While nothing in Title VII or the FEHA specifically prohibits such inquiries, membership in certain groups can disclose protected status. . . . [big jump] Labor Code section 1101 guarantees employees’ rights to political freedom. . . . While this statute does not refer to applicants, inquiry into political activity in the interview phase, could be construed as tending to control or direct the employee’s political affiliations in the future.” In other words, it’s not strictly prohibited, but most California labor and employment lawyers would probably advise their clients not to ask or base hiring decisions on it. (I certainly would.) Bear in mind, if you’re a decent-sized employer, just getting sued on something like this is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that’s if you win.

I think there’s a difference between saying to a person, “If you want equal treatment, stop being a Lutheran,” and “If you want equal treatment, stop being a Klansman.”

For some reason this reminds me of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

@ 278: Agreed, there’s layers of absurdity in “the real deal” beyond what the skit made of it.

@ adam.smith:

“That said, this wouldn’t affect hiring, though, would it? You could refuse to hire conservatives but not women or African Americans, right?”

There are some sentiments here against at-will employment, but it’s worth mentioning that a lot – no idea if it’s wise to say “probably most,” but surely tons – during the hiring process, simply because of the ease with which it could be said that “we thought other applicants were uniquely qualified.” Even saying “we thought other applicants would be a better fit with our corporate culture” doesn’t seem to raise eyebrows.

There was at least one very recent study which sent around resumes with “non-white-sounding” names and there was significantly lower follow-through on those than on the applications with the white-sounding names.

Thankfully, it doesn’t seem that politics can be easily determined from one’s name (although an employer could make a guess that an applicant with a “black-sounding” name might be a Democrat, and a well-presented application with a white sounding name applying for a management job might be a Republican).

Excuse me if I’m getting off the rails a bit here though – the hiring process allows for a lot of abuses because it is fundamentally about giving one person the power to approve or disapprove of another in a way with potentially material consequences, and as enough people making employment decisions share similar biases, on the aggregate you have a sizable problem of bias against various people – though I’ve not heard that there is a political component to this (at least in the post-blacklist days, but that didn’t permeate society in the way that still current anti-black job discrimination seems to).

Apologies again; I didn’t mean to imply that you, personally, didn’t understand this.

Hrm.

Then who was your comment directed to, who was it you wished to impart previously-unknown unknown information to?

@Graf – thanks, I was maybe just getting frustrated bc I felt we were talking past each other. But this is helpful:

I think one could make the case that society as a whole would want to encourage religious affiliation, or even perhaps be indifferent thereto, but would want to discourage membership in violent racist hate groups. I think there’s a difference between saying to a person, “If you want equal treatment, stop being a Lutheran,” and “If you want equal treatment, stop being a Klansman.”

I don’t think this works. The main reason is that you could substitute “social democrat” for “Klansman” and I’m not convinced that there is a difference between “I think there’s a difference between saying to a person, “If you want equal treatment, stop being a Lutheran,” and “If you want equal treatment, stop being a Klansman.””
But I don’t think the state should be in the business of distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable political views, so any rule that applies to a Klansman needs to apply equally to a social democrat. (This is assuming, of course, that the Klansman hasn’t done anything illegal, in which case discrimination could be based on his criminal record).

The other reason is that I’m uncomfortable making non-discrimination essentially dependent on social approval. I don’t think we’d want to argue that protection against discrimination should depend on society deeming a group “worthy”. This may, as others have suggested, empirically be the case, but I’d say that’s a bad thing. (btw. most arguments about Trolley problem I’m aware of focus on differences in the actions – i.e. process rules – rather than context.)

So for me this leaves me with these still unsatisfactory, but at least tentative rules for when a class should be protected:
1. history of discrimination
2. key part of a persons identity
to this I’d add
3. no negative impact on others

I believe 3.) here is key to allowing us to distinguish politics from religion (or sexual orientation).

@etv13 – thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to look that up. Makes it all the more scandalous that we still have no such protection for sexual orientation in 29 states. Who knows, ENDA might actually pass the House at some point.

@Ed – of course de facto discrimination occurs in hiring and is, unless the employer is rather inept, impossible to prove. That’s a problem with no good solution – as I mention upthread there are agencies that use undercover stings to expose such discrimination in housing, but in employment the same is all but impossible, but of course no reason to give up on anti-discrimination provisions. For large employers it may be possible to make a statistical case that discrimination occurs. That has been done successfully for promotions in the past, though of course it’s much harder for hiring.

etseq-
Of the 16 (so far) uses in this thread of the noun phrase “concern troll” and its adverbial noun instance “concern trolling”, 10 of them have been by you.
This seems to be something you’re very concerned about.

Also:
… sophisticated enough to engage on the surface level but then spew out paragraph after paragraph of non-sequitors, along with a nasty libertarian dudebro attitude.

Gonzo! Fiery breath! Mean and quick-witted invective!
Gettin it done, man!
–
More seriously – there was a movement in my youth some of the older readers here maybe familiar with. It was called the “Civil Rights” Movement.
Very controversial at the time, a certain amount of polarity in evidence (you wouldn’t believe how nasty, and mainstream), and a lot of legal battles.
Also assassinations. Martin Luther King, the acknowledged hero of that movement, was killed in an assassination that to this day is pretty much unresolved.
But “12 Years A Slave”! Lupita! Obama!
Yeah?
Jordan Davis. Trayvon Martin. The percentages of black males killed in the street, unemployed, in privatized prisons in virtual slavery.
Non sequitor right, you astute little thing you?
Maybe.
Or maybe the gloss of mainstream social acceptance, which is mostly a mediated virtual fantasyland, doesn’t mean much.
Maybe there’s a cosmetic aspect to same sex marriage, just like there is to the seemingly post-racist nature of American reality?
Maybe what was really going on there didn’t get fixed by laws and national holidays and school themes. Just prettied up.
But it sure made a lot of relatively gullible folks feel better. About things, and themselves.
There’s a constellation of motives behind the bigotry at question here. Not all of it is ignorant and superstitiously fearful. Some of it is genuine, if basically unsophisticated and bewildered, concern.
Not just for children as consumer accoutrements, but for the world those children will have to live in, and how they’ll have to live in it.
Yelling that it’s all nothing but prejudicial ignorance, wholly inferior to your massively superior grasp of what’s important, may make you feel better, but my guess is you feeling better isn’t going to do shit to change what really needs changing.

@adam.smith,

I’m not sure I would put “being a Klansman” in the category of “political views.”

“Political views,” like “religious beliefs,” are thoughts. We can’t outlaw thoughts, we can’t evaluate thoughts, we can’t base legal duties and entitlements on thoughts, and we can’t even really encourage or discourage thoughts qua thoughts. Unlike being black, female or Mexican, which are characteristics, unlike being a rapist or a child molester, which are behaviors, and irrespective of thoughts being incidental to characteristics and behaviors, “views” and “beliefs” by themselves are pure thoughts.

Being a member of a violent racist hate group involves more than simply having thoughts. Seeking, attaining and maintaining membership in a particular club or organization is a behavior. And it’s a behavior that, one could argue, has a negative effect on society, even constitutes a threat to society, that society might have an interest in keeping to a minimum. Meaning society has an interest in having as few people as possible be members of violent racist hate groups, and therefore is not going to encourage or enable membership in violent racist hate groups (or encourage and enable any concomitant behaviors) by protecting members of violent racist hate groups from discrimination on the basis of such membership.

Does society have a similar interest in having as few people as possible being Lutherans?

Does society have a similar interest in having as few people as possible being social democrats?

Does society have a similar interest in having as few people as possible being gay?

One could argue that the existence and presence of violent racist hate groups is harmful to society. Is the existence and presence of Lutherans harmful to society in the same fashion? Or social democrats? Or gays?

I understand your frustration, but I’m just not sure we can really do much better than that. In the end society, via the law, has to make moral and legal judgments about what it will and will not tolerate. That answer is highly unsatisfactory and inadequate in light of Justice Scalia’s acid dissents in Romer, Lawrence and Windsor. But we’ve gotten to where we are in part because society has slowly, gradually, finally, come to the realization that the mere existence and presence of gay people is not harmful to society, let alone in the same way that the existence and presence of violent racist hate groups is harmful to society. And yet there are exceptions; the principle collapses if a person believes that gay people and homosexuality are just as evil, dangerous, threatening and harmful to society as Klansmen and racism.

But again, I don’t know if we can do any better. Eventually we reach a point where things really can’t be objectively and abstractly categorized any further, and we have to rely on our collective wisdom, experience and morality to “know” what’s right and reach the proper conclusion.

The idea that being in the Klan isn’t sufficiently political seems strange to me. With apologies to Republicans, if you have some Republican who holds some Klan-like sentiments (but perhaps not the full spectrum), how do you propose to litmus test the difference between them and a Klansman?

I totally get the not wanting to give quarter to racism, but it seems that we can get tangled up in a process that will essentially end in just giving ad-hoc justifications for approving or disapproving of different groups’ right to partake in some of the goods of society.

@ adam.smith: Good expansion there of the points I was trying to make. I know you know of these things. One thing comes to mind, though – what makes stings against employers impossible? I see the difference between that and a sting of bars that don’t card minors, but I am not sure what the difference is with housing. HUD’s reliance on a network of small testing groups without good funding (e.g. Fair Housing Center of metro Detroit) seems to me to indicate what we might expect if the government tried to get started on policing this – it would only do it half-heartedly, with not enough funding and with prominent pushback and allegations of political interference from the business community.

“More seriously – there was a movement in my youth some of the older readers here maybe familiar with. It was called the “Civil Rights” Movement.”

If only Dr. King had said something about people who wanted to be cautious, people who ask those being oppressed to be patient and wait for equality.

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

“Yelling that it’s all nothing but prejudicial ignorance, wholly inferior to your massively superior grasp of what’s important, may make you feel better, but my guess is you feeling better isn’t going to do shit to change what really needs changing.”

Hmmm… If only there was someway we could see if the current approach to gay rights was working or not? Some method through which we could discover if the attitude of the general public are changing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/support-for-same-sex-marriage-hits-new-high-half-say-constitution-guarantees-right/2014/03/04/f737e87e-a3e5-11e3-a5fa-55f0c77bf39c_story.html

In short screw being understanding with bigots. We will drag them into the 21st century kicking and screaming. The kids will be better off growing up in a world where two people who love each other can get married, just like everybody else.

/but like I have already said twice you are no ally of mine.

@307 – Ditto – Roy isn’t a very good concern troll – they have to have thick skin to survive and he is obviously VERY sensitive to being called out on his crap.

The others in this thread seem to be more interested in metaphysical questions and in divining some sort of unifying theory to tie together various strands of jurisprudence and positive law regarding non-discrimination. It’s interesting but in the end I am too much of a legal realist to tilt at those windmills. I am not a cynic, however, and unlike the crits, I do see a valuable roll for legal counter-majoritarianism. Courts will always be constrained but they do serve as a signalling device for a certain type of public/constitutional morality that is very powerful, especially in light of the Civil Rights movement.

Roy sure does get his grumpy when he is challenged….not a very good concern troll – too emotive…

@Collin,

I thought of that, and it’s a valid point. Hate crime enhancements are problematic legally and constitutionally, because inter alia of the impossibility of literal, direct mind-reading. We get away with it because as you pointed out, thought can be derived from action, as in the case of hate crime enhancements, but action is only circumstantial evidence of thought; direct evidence of thought is impossible except for an admission thereto by the thinker. The thought as motivation for the action, as opposed to the thought qua the thought, is what the law discourages and punishes. The thought itself is not the crime, the legality or illegality of the act doesn’t depend on the thought, guilt or innocence doesn’t depend on the thought. The act has to occur and be proven first before the thought becomes relevant.

Thoughts qua thoughts can’t be illegal. Being a pedophile is not illegal; molesting children is. You can be sexually attracted to kids, and even tell the whole world that you are, but there’s nothing society can do via the law to punish or discourage pedophilia except forbid you from acting on it.

GrafZeppelin127: “I thought of that, and it’s a valid point. Hate crime enhancements are problematic legally and constitutionally, because inter alia of the impossibility of literal, direct mind-reading. ”

Wrong. Many laws and principles rely on making reasonable conclusions about states of mind.

“There’s age limits everywhere, though afaik they do vary a little from state to state in the US.
And there’s an absolute limit on the number of people who can get married – it’s two.
Is that natural? Normal?
Or just old-fashioned and stupid?”

Comparing gay marriage to marrying children? Classy Roy. Classy. Like I said you are no ally of mine.

I certainly gain the impression that Roy is suggesting that people who demand witch-hunts against ‘bigotry’ can easily become bigots themselves in their own own self-righteousness and unwillingness to recognise other points of view.

This thread has certainly proved him right.

The difference between a Klansman and a “Republican with Klan-like views” is simple: one chose to join and be a member of that particular club, the other did not.

but the Klan isn’t illegal, so I really don’t see how membership in it should matter. But also, using the Klan has really distracted from what I wanted to get at, so let’s drop it. In everything I wrote, please replace “Klansman” with “Social Democrat”. Social democrats are a small minority in the US, but
In @279, you say that you don’t think politics should be specifically protected against discrimination. So if I understood that right, you think it should be/remain legal e.g. for a caterer to refuse to cater a meeting of the DSA because of their politics. If that’s the case, my question remains – how is that different in a relevant way from discriminating against a religion?

Shorter Igor: Won’t somebody think of the bigots?

If the only reason you can think of for opposing some social practice is that it’s new, untested, and unproven, then that is, in fact, bigotry, because we try new, untested, unproven things all the time without public outcry (as I tried to point out @238, though formatting problems got in the way).

Note that civil unions are at least as untested and unproven as gay marriage. You want to create a new, parallel marriage-like system that couples can enter into and adopt children? Will civil unions be just as good as for children as marriage? Will people who would otherwise have gotten married instead enter civil unions? These are untested questions, but the potential social harms from civil unions seem at least as plausible as the imagined harms from gay marriage.

As soon as we legalized homosexual sex, we were on untested territory. Given that homosexual sex was illegal, of course marriage had to be heterosexual only. Once gay sex is legal, preventing out-of-the-closet gay couples from marrying was an untested and unproven state of affairs. (And to the extent it has been tested since then the results have been unfortunate).

Note that polygamy and underage marriage are not new, untested, or unproven at all–we abandoned them because of negative experience with them.

Are there ignorance, prejudiced people that we should still feel sympathy with? Absolutely, we should all still feel sympathy for Uganda, even if their despicable new anti-gay legislation seems to be popular. And, yes, that bigots see fit to deny the fundamental rights of gay people does play to benefit of the wealthy and powerful across the globe.

But the thing about “let’s you and him fight!” is that even if you don’t want to fight, if the other guy does, you’re gonna fight. Gay people aren’t under any obligation to pretend that their rights aren’t being denied or that bigotry doesn’t exist just because it would be convenient for the larger progressive project. And if you’re going around screaming at gay rights supporters that they’re obligated to, then you are the one who is picking a fight.

Here is the most ineffective civil rights argument ever: “Your legitimate concern that extending me basic rights is an untested, untried proposition is not bigoted at all, but I’m asking you to put that concern aside because it means a lot to me”. The seems to be the only argument that permitted to us by the opposition-to-bigotry-is-bigotry brigade.

I don’t think anyone who has commented on this thread is homophobic

If you don’t think that Alex, who thinks that teh gayz are stealing straight folks’ children, is homophobic we’re clearly not using that word the same way.
I do think Ed got a bit of undeserved flak, but he also stumbled remarkably cluelessly into the whole Regnerus thing and I can’t blame people like etseq for being a wee bit frustrated when people act as if Regnerus hasn’t already been thoroughly discredited.

(I ignore any conversation involving roy belmont since I can’t be bothered to read something formatted purposefully to be unreadable, so no idea what went down on that part of the thread).

I think a key here is the very concept of “religious liberty.” Why should religion be considered some special set, deserving of special protections? What has it ever done to deserve that? What history of oppression does it have to show in this country to garner that?

If anything, organized religions have been the institutions delivering the oppression through the centuries, not suffering from it. They have been the orgs dishing it out, not receiving it.

Especially Christianity. And given its overwhelming majority status, it’s a bit like setting aside special rights (and rites) for CEOs of Goldman Sachs, because of all the “oppression” they’ve had to deal with over the years.

We need to reassess our relationship to religious organizations, and force them to make a case for their continued special rights. We should start by ending their tax exempt status. Yesterday.

What history of oppression does it have to show in this country to garner that?

I’m not the biggest fan of religion, but surely you’re joking?
Discrimination against “papists” catholics, anti-semitism (with Jewish quotas and all), the Haun’s Hill massacre of Mormons, random attacks on Sikhs, the NYPDs (and FBIs) surveillance of mosques etc. etc. this stuff really isn’t hard to come up with. Also, of course, religious liberty protects atheists as well and that’s not a hypothetical. Atheists have won their share of 1st amendment/religious liberty cases.

Tax exempt status is a separate issue, though it’s so firmly engrained in 1st amendment jurisprudence that I doubt it’s worth spending much time on. If you’re going after quasi-utopian goals, there are more worthwhile ones.

I presume the purpose of discrimination is to control the people discriminated against.

Does it matter to justice or liberty, whether the characteristic upon which discrimination focuses is more or less indelible?

Are we saying that discrimination in employment, say, would be OK, if it aimed to control one’s political affiliations and behavior? Or, religious commitments?

“If you don’t think that Alex, who thinks that teh gayz are stealing straight folks’ children, is homophobic we’re clearly not using that word the same way.”

Am I also heterophobic when I object to the impact of child of the family provisions, step parental adoption, & the presumption of legitimacy, in straight marriages?

The gay rights movement chose their position. It disagrees with traditionalists on who should be able to marry, but they’re in agreement with the most revanchist conservatives when it comes down to the impact of marriage on parental rights. It it a shame this has happened to a movement that was once progressive.

I could see myself supporting gay marriage in other circumstances. We could have a gay rights movement which didn’t campaign against the rights of bioparents. We could have one which didn’t pretend gay parenthood was homosexuals adopting orphans, when it’s in fact mostly bi-sexuals with children from prior relationships. But we don’t.

Plume – if what you wanted to talk about was that religious liberty shouldn’t be an excuse to legitimize discrimination (something that pretty much anyone here agrees with), then why not write that rather than

I think a key here is the very concept of “religious liberty.”

(my emph.) and

What history of oppression does it [religion] have to show in this country to garner that?

If you think that’s the way to make a contextual rather than a general statement about religions liberty then, well, your writing really sucks ;).

Am I also heterophobic when I object to the impact of child of the family provisions, step parental adoption, & the presumption of legitimacy, in straight marriages?

I dunno. Clearly, like most MRAs you have lots of fears&issues. You’ll be happier hashing them out with a good therapist than on the backs of other people (or in the comment section of this blog).

Beyond that, the issue with minority religions, as far as persecution goes, hasn’t been their inability to impose their narrow vision on employees or customers. At least not generally speaking. That seems predominantly to be an issue for the Christian majority, for their religious organizations, and for business owners who claim some form of “religious conscience” as an excuse.

How often do we bump into a Muslim or a Jew or a Buddhist or a Hindu angrily attacking some new rule that supposedly forces them into going against their religious conscience?

Of course, they may happen all the time, but we almost never hear about it. But we do, constantly, hear about how Christians are supposedly oppressed and forced to go against their beliefs in this or that situation.

We never should have handed out exemptions in the first place. This is a secular society. If you’re a citizen, you should adhere to the laws of this society. Having a religious exemption is no more legitimate than having because you’re left-handed, or you have hazel eyes, or you like broccoli for dessert. Why religious exemptions, and not exemptions for a thousand other reasons?

We could have a gay rights movement which didn’t campaign against the rights of bioparents.

I saw a bioparent on the sidewalk just ten minutes ago. I pushed him over and his little bag of groceries spilled out all over the sidewalk. HA HA HA.

The bigoted argument, yes.

I saw a bioparent on the sidewalk just ten minutes ago. I pushed him over and his little bag of groceries spilled out all over the sidewalk. HA HA HA

If you didn’t also snatch their children, you’ve failed “the movement”. We’re disappointed.

Sorry, scratch that last response. Confidence levels time!
“And when one argument is shown to be bad, the opponent moves on to the next bad one. Why might that be?” Confidence level the question is rhetorical: Have a guess, take a number.

Confidence level that people quoting this question understand it is a rhetorical question: 95%+

“Only now they’ve got them a mixed-race presnet and a buncha gay-bobs on the TV.
To deflect anything like a movement toward full-spectrum change.
Like the change MLK was moving toward.
When they killed him.”
Confidence level in Full Spectrum Presnets: 110%! That roy’s artificial lung is malfunctioning: 70%?

Also, roy-

Reason doesn’t have anything to say about morality. At all.

Actually, reason has quite a bit to say about morality. But reason is a subtle thing.

Gendered insults are probably the wrong way to dodge an MRA accusation.

It’s grand entertainment, Crooked Timber is – grand entertainment!

You speak true, Tyrone.

Special treat for roy.

Ed Herdman,

No backpedaling. The subject was America, not other nations.

America is easily the most religiously besotted nation in the developed world, the one most likely to believe in Creationism, and not believe in Evolution, the one with the most carve outs and exemptions for religious belief, and the one that lets religion infiltrate the public sphere (especially schools) the most.

Again, this is a major mistake, IMO. There should be no special exemptions for religious affiliation. I see no more logic to given them out than to give them out to members of the polar bear club, the chess club, the bird watchers club. There is no logic or societal interest in doing so.

FWIW (not much), Plume, although I said your position was reasonable, I can’t sign on to it fully. For example, I don’t think the government has the right to ban communion wine or kosher/halal food preparation, even if those bans were incidental results of some genuinely secular goal.

To put it another way, although I see problems in the the “free exercise” concept of religious freedom, I have difficulty coming up with any less problematic alternative. I have some vague nothing that if something is really important to someone that other people should make reasonable accommodations for it, but it’s hard for me to a workable rule that doesn’t explicitly favor religious motivations. Looking over the history of the Constitution, I would say the free exercise clause has prevented more harm than it caused, even if some conservatives today (from the Arizona legislature to Hobby Lobby) seem determined to prove me wrong.

It does seem like the logical consequence of this is for people who don’t believe in deities to create religion-like entities of their own. I mean, Objectivism is pretty religion-like, isn’t it? Whoops, now all taxation violates the First Amendment. Not every faith respects “Render unto Caesar”.

I should also say that I could could imagine religion-like non-supernatural entities being employed for good. Perhaps a “religion” around cloud computing, insisting on something like confessional privilege.

Okay, but consider photo ID. It seems both reasonable to require most people to have them, yet hard to avoid making alternative arrangements for people of faiths that refuse to accept them.

Consumatopia,

I guess there would be all kinds of “no harm, no foul” kinds of situations. In all of those, I wouldn’t really care. It makes governance very complex and messy, but that’s to be expected. Perhaps if we could limit those exceptions to just that kind of thing — the kind of things without broader implications, without harm to others — and that would be key.

Would that exception of exemption involve a conflict with someone else’s rights or freedoms?

In the case of having or not having an ID, it sounds like it’s a no harm, no foul deal.

But would Republican officials except this when it comes to voting? Perhaps only if they think that particular religious group is likely to vote for them.

Again, it is messy and complicated. So I’d err on the no harm, no foul side, and if that’s not the situation, the “everyone has to stop at red lights” side.

Last comment.

Would that we could all arrive at common ground, consensus, solutions, via the democratic process, etc.. Truly democratic. Not in name only. But the real thing, voluntarily.

I’d rather we have far less separation, segregation, separatism, according to this or that belief. Agreement, cooperation, consensus and solidarity, rather than being at each others throats all the time.

As my grandma used to say, watching us wee siblings argue things to death, “Fight ye devils, fight!! I hate peace!”

G’night, all. And, please, stop beating up bioparents. It’s just so unseemly.

for those still reading along, Linda Greenhouse’s column on the topic is, even by her standards, exceptionally good: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/opinion/greenhouse-after-the-veto.html
It’s a great primer on SCOTUS on religious freedom. One of the interesting things I learned is that Scalia wrote the majority opinion in two key cases in which SCOTUS restricted religious exemptions. Another interesting bit is that the SCOTUS decision that caused Congress to – almost unanimously – pass the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” was about native American religion. Lots more interesting bits and discussion.

Ugh, TED talks. Sam Harris really shouldn’t try to lecture anyone about moral philosophy.

#372

I have say I disagree. It is simply his way of making his comments seem deeper and more interesting than they actually are. Take his comment at 340 for example. Once you take out the weird formatting, repetition and odd word choice all he is saying is why should we let gays get married if we don’t let people marry children or if we don’t allow polygamy. Add on to that a bit of “what if the bigots are right about teh gays effects on children/society” and “what if you worked with the people who hate you and call your love an abomination” and you have his contribution to this thread. None of it is new or interesting. In fact, it is basically what he says in any thread on gay rights.

And frankly I am tired of his condescension.

Said it before, I’ll say it again.

Witch-hunt.

“Said it before, I’ll say it again.

Witch-hunt.”

So are Alex’s comments acceptable?

Roy doesn’t have line-breaks and paragraphing, he has line-breaks instead of paragraphing. And he clearly has some kind of problem here, because he’s constantly complaining that everyone misunderstands him. That’s not everyone else’s fault.

But even though the formatting does make it harder to go back and check what he said previously, I don’t think it’s the main culprit here. I would point to all of his rhetorical questions (320 nailed this). Combine that with an anti-reason hyper-evolutionary world view that doesn’t seem to be quite fully worked out, and it’s often genuinely difficult to guess what answer he was expecting.

@ MPA Victoria

I was referring to the Roy-baiting.

If people were only going to post comments that all agreed with each other then this blog would be ridiculously dull. Some regular commentators who have now been ejected from the site were relentlessly trolling and deliberately causing offence. I hardly think this applies to Roy, and to single out his style of writing is just childish, especially in view of the fact that there seem to be few rules for the expression of prose in blog comments.

Aphorism seems to be most hated of isms. Metaphor, meta-anything, in fact, is a drag. Phenomenology is for the weak. Never mind we aren’t sure what it is, we must do something about it. Post-haste. Buddhists, poets, post-modernists, and other artists of the articulate absence need not apply.

Damned if I know why we have to be this way — at any rate I fail to see why a certain amount of seemingly aimless pondering ever hurt anyone. Let’s for variety’s sake welcome the whole menagerie, even the grinders of teeth, and do please leave off telling everyone we’ve heard it all before, which is never, ever true.

384 and 382 reflect my thoughts nicely. I find Roy very aggravating but have no wish for him to leave.

Roy doesn’t have line-breaks and paragraphing, he has line-breaks instead of paragraphing.

It’s pretty straightforward: each paragraph is a sentence long, or equivalently each sentence forms a complete paragraph. It looks a bit more complex than that, but that’s just because there’s no blank lines between paragraphs so the paragraph-ending line-breaks get confused with the paragraph-internal soft line-breaks. Look at the short lines, see how they all end sentences, and how all ends-of-sentences match ends-of-lines.
[ragged-right text, without marking your paragraphs by indentation or vertical spacing? bad typographic choice, as we see here.]

Which is to say, Roy’s language isn’t consciously structured above the sentence level.

As I’ve mentioned before, problems with language structures above the sentence [“pragmatics”] are a common symptom of mild autism-spectrum conditions, because real-world language structures work on knowing what your listeners/readers already know/think so you can pick the words that will help you change that to what you want them to know/think. And that “knowing what your listeners know/think” is empathy/theory-of-mind and that’s a core part of what makes autism autism.

[no mental-health qualifications, but a linguistics major and a Cert III graphic pre-press.]

real-world language structures work on knowing what your listeners/readers already know/think . . . . And that “knowing what your listeners know/think” is empathy/theory-of-mind and that’s a core part of what makes autism autism.

I’m no expert either, and in fact from the frequency with which you tell commenters they have mental-health issues, frankly, I assumed you were. But I don’t think the above is correct. People with autism do not have a theory of mind that is inaccurate in some specifics, so that they believe falsehoods about what other people believe. They are said to have no theory of mind, which is a bit different. I do not believe that the psychiatric definition of mental health includes “knowing what everybody else believes, feels, and wants, at all times.”

roy,

U B funny. Maybe you ought to make clear to me what you meant by “reason doesn’t have anything to say about morality.” You have talents–braggadocio for example–but clarity doesn’t seem one of them.

So, on the question of drawing lines regarding who can and cannot marry, there is a societal consensus that children and adults have different rights. As you say, this is not controversial. I would add, this distinction between youth and adult is reason based. The fact that some degree of uncertainty and arbitrariness is built into the problem of drawing a line between a legally responsible person and a legally not-responsible person does not negate the basis in reason of this distinction.

You also made this interesting remark,

You can’t just work with immediate obvious harm, there’s long term stuff no one can predict.

If “no one can predict” a future harm, then what? What are you suggesting? Blind writing of rules by wizardry?

*Btw, I don’t think I accused you of bigoted remarks in this thread. That would have been foolhardy of me since I haven’t read the entire thread. But, yes, you do come out with some pretty weird stuff about Jews…

If “no one can predict” a future harm, then what? What are you suggesting? Blind writing of rules by wizardry?

Well, it suggests a certain caution and tentativeness, same as any other unknown-unknown.

391-
Okay, “routinely” but not here, then.
It’s almost a cliche now, but it bears repeating: saying pejorative things about someone’s speech, especially in sensitive areas like either of those under discussion, without offering any example as proof, is a device for winning an argument without actually having to do anything involving ideas or meaning, or fact .
It’s a club not an argument.
You need to bring the actual factual. If you have it.
Or rather, if you think you do.
Because you don’t.

On Reason Alone, as a Proffered Foundation for Social, and Individual, Morality:

If “no one can predict” a future harm, then what? What are you suggesting?

I am suggesting we are in deep shit, and a whole lot of people are running around with shovels in their hands. Which you’d expect right? Except the hole’s getting deeper.

One would note that your response to the challenge made to a statement on your part purporting to situate reason as the only necessary underpinning for social morality was met with a question on your part as to my position on that subject. And nothing else.
–
Collin Street. Honor.
Tell your posterior I was only using his last name there for purposes of tough guy posturing. Using only last names is manly and gruff. In the same way that ignoring someone can be decorously insulting.
It had nothing to do with the semantic meaning or ethnic origins of said name in this instance. Those are unknown to me.
Plus, I have no idea whether someone’s name attached to a comment here is even connected to anything else, like their non-virtual life or something.

mattski-
Reason makes sense, sort of by definition. But without standing on received morality, there’s really nothing there.
Arguments that center around things like enlightened self-interest, or the thought problem of “If everybody can steal because stealing’s not wrong, then everyone has to guard their stuff all the time, and nothing gets done beyond mere animalistic survival”
imply a totality of comprehension that doesn’t exist.
Humans survived umpteen millennia with superstition and some form of religious engagement guiding their moral behavior. We’ve had a few hundred years of Enlightenment rationality, some of the products of which are not what any rational person would call an unqualified good.
Rebutting a criticism of rational morality, with the assumption and imputation that I’m suggesting institutional religious dogma as presently constituted in its place, isn’t going to get it. I’m not.
I’m waiting for your proposal that reason has a lot to say about morality, in the sense that it has something to offer in place of the obvious systemic failures of religious, as presently constructed, dogma.
Something besides a return to self-determined morality based on what bothers the socially powerful. Even though that’s what we have already pretty much. It’s just we have this gloss of something higher operating.
If there’s only the vision of individuals, however rational, in the present moment to guide our behavior, we’re screwed. Would be my basic position here.

@ Colin Street: Yeah, that’s a reasonable summary of things (though I have one quibble with what you write here). I am sorry for appearing to identify you with that principle.

I thought I made a misstatement in my post: “conservativism is the preferable outcome” could have been written as “conservatism is the preferred operating principle” (aside from fixing my usual “conservativism” typo).

I don’t think that the argument here is one where there ever was a state of affairs where there was some status quo that male-female couples only was a good state of affairs, though: There have always been people who do not fit in that rubric and there has always been a pressing need to fit families together. The ability of people to procreate in nontraditional ways just swings things further away from the wisdom of nostalgia-for-an-unreal-history, though.

Exceptions exist in those texts, of course. There is beautiful poetry, wonderful allegories, psalms, proverbs, etc. And the glorious and profound Sermon on the Mount. We can find beauty and wisdom in the pages of those texts.

But overall? Violence galore, cruelty galore, atrocities, genocide, misogyny — immorality writ large.

From my POV, the religious right has pretty much avoided and ignored the beauty and wisdom, choosing instead to key on the autocratic, authoritarian, cruel and absolute.

And that has had profoundly negative consequences in America.

This is obviously far afield at this point in the thread, but just for the sake of completeness, a note about ad hominem. My impression was that the point of getting to call the person who’s otherwise-friendly-but-anti-equal-marriage a ‘bigot’ or a ‘homophobe’ was precisely because whatever passive or active attitude or belief they hold that leads them to oppose equal marriage could be pushed back against as ‘socially illegitimate’ (to use the OP’s phrase), and so ignored. That’s the ad hominem: You’re a bigot; therefore, your argument isn’t worthy of consideration. He doesn’t make that point explicitly, but what else could be the point of trying to ensure that an argument can be treated as socially unacceptable?

roy, pardon me if I take unclear writing as evidence for unclear thinking. And pardon me if I take sloppy and inaccurate statements as evidence of sub-standard reasoning.

I am suggesting we are in deep shit

And how should we apply this nugget of wisdom?

One would note that your response to the challenge made to a statement on your part purporting to situate reason as the only necessary underpinning for social morality was met with a question on your part as to my position on that subject. And nothing else.

No, roy. You aren’t paying me the respect of listening to what I’m actually saying. “Only necessary underpinning?” That’s you, not me. And in support of my claim that reason has “quite a bit” to say about morality I did, in fact, post a video of Sam Harris speaking on the subject. I did not endorse everything Mr. Harris said, btw. But I gave you food for thought.

I also made a brief argument that the restriction on marriage by minors is supported by reason. Because youthful, immature people are not expected to have the capacity to make long term commitments. So when you say I offered “nothing else” you were just mistaken. Again.

My plea to you is this: when you write, slow down. Pay more attention.

@Aristodemus, 403

My impression was that the point of getting to call the person who’s otherwise-friendly-but-anti-equal-marriage a ‘bigot’ or a ‘homophobe’ was precisely because whatever passive or active attitude or belief they hold that leads them to oppose equal marriage could be pushed back against as ‘socially illegitimate’ (to use the OP’s phrase), and so ignored.

If you actually watched the video, you wouldn’t have that impression at all. He says something like “I’m a homophobe, how could I not be after being raised in this overwhelmingly homophobic society?” Panti and Henry’s point is that decent, otherwise reasonable people can find themselves with homophobic or otherwise fundamentally wrong beliefs.

That is not ad hominem. What it’s trying to do is avoid this kind of ad hominem: ‘these people seem reasonable and civil, they have high social ranking with media or academia, so if they’re arguing against someone’s right to get married, there must be something to it’. We still have to engage with homophobic reasoning, but we don’t have to compromise with it or assume that there is some degree of truth to it. Which is kind of important when your talking about positions that imply the inferiority of some classes of people. (Which I’m sure you won’t agree with, but 400 comments in I don’t care).

400+ comments! Yowza. Anyway, the thread is way past this, but I wanted to make a small point re the religion vs. politics thing from a 100+ comments ago:

Surely part of the distinction between religious beliefs (and activities) and political views is that we tend to regard a person’s religious beliefs and activities as part of the private sphere (whether rightly or wrongly), whereas political views and activities are by definition stances in the public sphere and indeed attempts—however indirect—at affecting/molding the public sphere that is shared by everyone. I don’t think this at all means that political views and activities shouldn’t be protected against discrimination (I think they should be), but I do think it has at least something to do with why we treat we treat religion and politics differently when it comes to protection against discrimination.

405-
The context in which you delivered “reason has a lot to say about” was, in my cursory haste-filled reading, one in which the intent was to center reason as good enough to build a moral system on.
Kind of a logic thing there. Having dispensed with received morality from dubious theo-centered sources and all. What’s left?
Logic. Reason.
If I’m going to argue with Sam Harris, I’ll argue with Sam Harris. Not that I’d actively seek out a conversation with a tendentious fool.
As nor did I seek this conversation. Your aggressive and borderline insulting response to my statement is why we’re talking.
After more than a couple of insults and misreadings from others and on and etc on.
Of course reason has a lot to say about morality, that’s what it does. Analyze, criticize. I love it, in its place.
It has not been, and never will be, the t-h-e tool for the creation of a system of human moral guidance.
The ascendant triumph of reason over both metaphysics and emotion has brought us to the brink of self-extinction. Just one of many condemning missiles I have at my disposal, waiting for your presence on the battlefield.
If you’d like to condense Harris’ hollow claptrap and represent on that, the part you agree with, feel free. The original offer stands.
I just want you to make an assertion to back your claim. Some meat for my ravenous hounds.
I have no obligation to replace the edifice of reason in some hypothetical moral architecture. My sole claim in this is that it has nothing to offer without something else being there first, and primary.
This:
Because youthful, immature people are not expected to have…
Can you not see that underneath that is the primary necessity for caring about children?
Emotion. Irrational heart-driven feeling.
That if someone doesn’t care what the effects on others are, their acts are only going to be governed and governable by self-interest internally and force and threat externally?
Which is where the argument generally ends up with chauvinists of rational supremacy.
This is a recipe for social collapse or the insectivization of the species. It is not a path toward a better world for anything but inhuman bugs.
So, again, meat.
Reason is____ to morality. Because____.
You can print that out and fill it in if you’d like.
Or just keep copping an attitude of baseless superiority, from which your specious advice as to the form of my writing descends to that strawman on the floor.
I’m up here, waiting.

I’m really quite sure that Roy WASN’T arguing in favour of ‘tradition’, so that makes most of your last post utterly superfluous.

If Roy wants to say BE NICE he could be less of a jerk about it.

Consumatopia,

Thanks for your smart & balanced remarks. I am guilty at the emotional level of taking roy’s bait. And, yeah, describing roy’s stuff as a rorschach blot is right on.

‘Nite.

412-
Against my better judgment I went back this in its entirety, and found a gift:

If I had to choose between the brink of self-extinction today, and centuries of stumbling around in ignorant darkness waiting for the next asteroid or gamma ray burst to wipe us out, I’ll definitely pick the former.

The accusation of incoherence from a mind capable of that.

mattski and I certainly don’t always agree, (I’d never link Sam Harris ;-)), but I think you’re being completely unfair with him. Anyway, ignoring all of that stuff at the beginning where you seemed to be mostly describing yourself…

It’s not that weird, man, that’s just an excuse and you know it.

Well, it’s just that you constantly complain about people misunderstanding you (as you’re insulting them for it). I promise you we’re not doing it on purpose!

“I guess if you elide completely the, to me, near endless reiteration, by me, of false polarities being the real danger in all this,”

For that to be a coherent point, you need to point at an actual false polarity that someone else holds, and I don’t believe that you have.

“you could manage to twist and rearrange what I’ve been saying into a “defense of tradition””

I figured that your defense of tradition, as I directly quoted, was supposed to be the false polarity you were trying to establish. If you don’t want to defend tradition anymore, that’s up to you.

Saying that we need moral distinctions as a social community isn’t overly controversial, I don’t think.

I don’t think so either.

to my assertion that the completely untried unproven assumption of reason as the only necessary ground for morality

I’m not sure whether mattski actually holds Sam Harris’s position or he just posted that because a Roy Belmont/Sam Harris juxtaposition is inherently hilarious. All we know is that he disagreed with the other half of your apparent false polarity “Reason doesn’t have anything to say about morality. At all.” I know, you meant something else by that! Something really sensible I’m sure!

(I might believe that if one had perfect Laplace’s Demon knowledge that all morality would be knowable by reason, but that’s an irrelevant impossibility.)

I don’t think anyone else claimed that “reason is the only necessary ground for morality”. I do believe, though, that in a pluralistic society, any sort of government-enforced morality must be grounded in reason. (Nothing can be the “only” anything, we must start with some assumptions, but those assumptions must be open to question.) When two people with different traditions disagree, something more than tradition (whose tradition!) is both empirically and morally required to resolve the conflict.

Maybe even a way that has tradition and reason and inspiration and compassion and wisdom and a whole lot more in it.

I think I offered such a way @412, if a bit dryly. More importantly, I think that’s exactly what Panti demonstrated in the video in the OP, as well as the linked audio interview. Did you see/hear those?

Without traditional morality, which is criminal in its dysfunctionality, we will need something more than reason to structure moral guidance, especially for the young. Reason is incapable, by itself, of anything like moral guidance. It’s parasitic, symbiotic at best. It needs a host. Whatever that is, it will be more likely to come from people who are not trying to tear each other apart.

I’ll buy that. Reason, by itself, isn’t really a motivator at all–it’s only engaged when motivators pull in different directions. But I mostly believe that people should default to conformance with tradition as individuals freely choosing to do so. With some encouragement and assistance from their neighbors, of course, but the closer that encouragement is to coercion, the stronger the need for publicly justifiable reason.

When others are very much not nice, Roy enjoys hinting that Roy may be capable of being really not nice as well.

You were never nice, Roy, but at this point I don’t really care because it’s kind of funny. Which I suspect is the attitude of most of your defenders above. After this thread, I don’t think that any promise by you to “eviscerate” anyone in an argument is credible anymore. You can enjoy hinting whatever you like.

(Nothing can be the “only” anything, we must start with some assumptions, but those assumptions must be open to question.)

Should be (Reason can’t be “only” anything…)

Hey, at least when I’m confusing, it’s not intentionally!

“Your coherent point is maybe something. Well done.”

Of course he then decided to try and tear other people apart….

“MPAV- Well, I’m not talking to you, either.
Only I worry that you won’t get that.”

It is not that I am not talking to you roy, if you ever have anything new to say please say it and I will certainly TRY to understand. It is just that in every thread about LGTB rights you are so busy defending the poor, persecuted bigot who just wants to be left alone to discriminate in peace that you never say anything original.

/Also implying that I am stupid is not really in keeping with the”I am so smart and above it all” persona you are trying to create but if it makes you feel better to attack my intelligence by all means carry on.
//I suppose if I posted all of my comments in Iambic pentameter or something I could be as smart as you.

Reason is pretty much the only way to profitably challenge our prejudices.

Traditions are also based on reason. Prejudice is also something that was introduced, long time ago, for a reason, and by now it has become certainty and doesn’t need reasons anymore. It’s definitely a good idea to challenge it, to rediscover its reasons and discuss them, but that’s not what’s going on when you just declare it ‘bigotry’.

“It’s definitely a good idea to challenge it, to rediscover its reasons and discuss them, but that’s not what’s going on when you just declare it ‘bigotry’.”

We didn’t just randomly declare it bigotry. We know, from experience, that otherwise decent and intelligent people, when raised in a society that is deeply prejudiced against a group of people, are likely to share that prejudice. We’ve been having this argument for quite a few years, with no one finding an argument on that side that didn’t depend on bigoted assumptions. It’s reasonable to hypothesize that there isn’t any. The way to refute that hypothesis is to find a non-bigoted argument against gay marriage. It does NOT refute the hypothesis to just assume that the numerous opponents of gay marriage must have some valid reason.

In other words, even within Western secular moral traditions, there are fundamental disagreements among rational people [that] don’t seem to be resolvable by collecting descriptive facts.

Agree. There are going to be moral questions that don’t have obvious answers, and that will be decided relatively arbitrarily. This is a good problem to have since it suggests that there isn’t very much at stake in such an instance.

Also, our uncertainty about the facts is obviously morally significant–we can never know with certainty how our actions will effect human flourishing.

Yes. But you’re also introducing knowledge of future facts, which is a different sort of thing. Scientific method = usually a pretty good approach.

CF very obviously did not in any way argue that religiously inspired bigotry is acceptable.

He is arguing that viewing homosexuality as a sin/wrong does not make you a bigot.

A bigot is

a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance

The Pope is not a bigot. He does not hate people who masturbate. He does not hate people who have used contraception. He does not hate homosexuals. He will not marry homosexuals but that does not make him a bigot.

Pretending that CF is arguing that religiously inspired bigotry is acceptable is a neat shuffle that allow us to skip that actual debate. We can declare any disapproval of homosexuality as defacto bigotry. Without any bothersome analogies that demonstrate how nonsensical it is to automatically equate disapproval of homosexuality with bigotry.

So the Pope is not “a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices”?

“When, what year approximately has it become bigotry?”

At what point did slavery become wrong? At what point did viewing women as property become sexist?

Yes.

Ze, you’re dumb enough to think you know what everyone you see thinks. You’re not qualified to give a yes.

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2014/02/28/hunted-in-russia-a-documentary-about-vigilante-groups-that-track-down-beat-up-and-humiliate-gay-men/

The Temporary Name,

‘You understand the way dictionaries work, right?’

Not perfectly but pretty well. That is why I copy/pasted the definition I supplied from a dictionary.

More just for fun, now:

The sun and the moon, both perfectly circular, both occupying a .5 degree arc of the celestial sphere. Precisely.
They both rise in the east and set in the west.
They both shed light.
Any reasonable person observing that, without information from outside the range of observation and logical process, would assume they were the same size and doing generally the same things. But no. Au contraire.
Fortunately we figured out that was wrong before sending humans toward them.
But there is no reason, other than immaturity and desperate hunger for someone to look down on, to disdain those who thought that before the geometries and lenses of science gave us the truer picture. This is the same disdain that has us scorning our own ancestors for their much harder lives. It is travesty, and dishonorable.

It shouldn’t need saying but our progress of knowing is littered with counter-intuitive destructions of what seemed obvious and rational until proven otherwise.
Some humility is called for but instead we’re now watching tunnel-blind meta-arrogant technicians take their dull knives to the core structures of material being.
What could possibly go wrong?
And they’re being enabled by bewildered and angry folks who’ve been driven into reactions to threats which are real and present dangers to themselves, however artificial their origin.

In the case of what’s now called the LGBT community, the threats are of continuing vicious intolerance from what most of that community perceives as religious tradition.
Or bigotry. Because that’s what it itself says it is, religiously validated intolerance. Maybe it’s lies, maybe it’s delusion, maybe something else is going on.

Having already made my central point as clearly as I am able, let me just say, sort of again, there are many decent people behind that wall of intolerance who are as scared and threatened as anyone else. And angry about it.
They’re being amped, played, used to fight pseudo-battles, sports contests involving real lives, to keep the strength of common purpose from turning against what’s really messing everybody up.

See? Normal writing. Fun.
I’m not interested in further engagement on this, too much ego-driven crap, too much nonsense, no substance, no furthering.

MPAV- What I was afraid you wouldn’t get is the paradoxical nature of telling someone, by talking to them, that you aren’t talking to them.
More seriously, I don’t think you can tell that what I’m doing is not dancing around without taking a side – I’m insisting that the place and the matter of dispute are much bigger and more complex, and the nature of that too easily, without difficult explication, lost in the noise of shallow cliche and mindless knee-jerk reactions.
I understand the real suffering behind your voice. Believe me if you knew where I’ve been, and what it’s been like for me… well, it wouldn’t seem so stupid for one thing, to be trying to get what few open minds and hearts there still are to reach across these narrow temporary bridges.
Life is brief.

Hmm, “susceptible to reasoned critique” – on their own grounds of course. There’s a lot of great literature out there begging people not to make this move (Russell, Sagan et al) so the point is really not about argumentative tactics, but rather psychological ones. I’m not so naive to think that if you look at the Pope with puppy-dog eyes long enough that he’ll let women into the priesthood, though. The point is rather to be careful about deploying that option, if possible. Shock eventually loses its power to shock.

Shock eventually loses its power to shock.

Who was it who believed the shock-talk shows like Jerry Springer in the US were a positive thing? I think the idea was that these were the only shows on which you would see deviations from the norm, however ridiculous, and that helped.

@ someguy88: I’m just giving this a really rough treatment. FWIW I think that people worrying about whether the Pope is a bigot should just be keeping their eyes on the ball. I don’t care if the Pope isn’t allowing women into his super-secret funhouse. I do care that the Pope and his system is propagating power discrepancies. I’ll give it to you though, the definitional stuff is hard to parse. But clearly some people can actually be bigots while claiming they have “good reasons” to be.

@ Temp Name:

I’m not coming at this from the belief that the desire of centrists to have a polite, mild discussion overrides the necessity of some people being loud and abrasive. That’s clearly been helpful to society, like the Stonewall Riot guy who said (IIRC) that they were tired of the ‘polite little fairies’ stereotype. It’s OK to start out with the message cranked up all the way. I agree that the Springer Show can be an example where shock starts to become a parody of itself, but there’s also been a lot of people who were able to take the show seriously, sometimes even coming to important revelations when the show was intending anything but.

People trying to get the message across do have to try to find the effective way of getting the message across – but there’s also right not to carry the whole burden in a conversation with people who just want to do their thing without worrying about being called bigotry (or dealing with important little niceties like not actually propagating harms on other people). That’s just a way of trying to dress up a lack of consideration for others, with just the bare minimum of realization that others have an actual interest in the issues.

I agree that there are multiple ways to go about things, and certainly kinder people will do kinder things. They’re out there! Perhaps Roy can exercise his excessive kindness and good feeling to encourage the people doing the good things, rather than trying to poop in the punch-bowl of those who, at some future time, may cause some unspecified moral apocalypse by being mean to people who don’t like certain other people to have rights. Here and now those complaining about being called bigots have gotten us up to 453. They’re doing a lot of thinking about this stuff and not simply running off in disgust.

Finding it a bit hard to traverse your intention shifts (from seriousness-to-irony-and-back in the same sentence, multiple times?) but I can say this: Aside from a matter of decorum, I’m not complaining about the bigot-calling at all. If it’s effective then it’s fine by me. Roy is one of the people who probably is an easy target for that kind of thing, since he is getting mad at being called a bigot but can’t quite find it in himself to do anything to kick the habit – do anything other than keep complaining of a failure on the other side to be respectful of what cannot be respected. For people who aren’t introspective at all, these niceties in hopes of instilling a value shift obviously don’t apply.

I’m sure those people saved from Mason Jar masturbatory artifacts three generations from now will be lining up to shake your very individual hand, roy.

But there is no reason, other than immaturity and desperate hunger for someone to look down on, to disdain those who thought that before the geometries and lenses of science gave us the truer picture.

This is absolutely true, the Karl Popper essay on tradition I mentioned above strongly makes this case. Our explanations today aren’t better because they’re “sciency” looking while the old ones are goofy looking. They’re better because our ancestors developed a tradition of critiquing their explanations by comparing them to alternatives.

Some humility is called for but instead we’re now watching tunnel-blind meta-arrogant technicians take their dull knives to the core structures of material being.

In the case of gay marriage, what’s actually happening is that we’re now recognizing previously unrecognized “core structures” that were forced to remain silent. I mean, I think you get this, but it’s worth emphasizing–it is gay marriage opponents, not advocates, who want to cut out pieces of reality that do not fit their mental abstraction.

Having already made my central point as clearly as I am able, let me just say, sort of again, there are many decent people behind that wall of intolerance who are as scared and threatened as anyone else.

Of course. Panti Bliss made that point all the way at the top. The question is, how should we respectfully approach these decent, scared people, without implicitly validating their mistaken and hurful views? Panti did a better job navigating that Scylla and Charybdis than I can recall any other speaker doing off the top of my head.

I’m not interested in further engagement on this, too much ego-driven crap, too much nonsense, no substance, no furthering.

It might have gone better if your first post were like this last (good) one.

Oh, you’re back to trying to eviscerate us. Because, yeah, ask around, I’m sure a bunch of us feel that Roy really told us what was what.

Here’s something I wondered about:

Incoherent pro-gay argument.

Where was this incoherent pro-gay argument? In Panti’s video? The audio interview? In Henry’s OP? In the 19 posts preceding the point at which you said that?

More anecdotes:
Tod Browning’s Freaks, a movie ostensibly about the circus and actual freaks. It has actual freaks in it, and a villain who’s Hollywood 30’s glamorous. She’s venal, conniving, and uses the main protagonist, a midget, to get to his wealth, by seducing him.
In the end she’s turned into a freak by being…well, you should see it I guess.
The virulent cruel rage of the oppressed, when they get the upper hand.

I get shit for not being easy to read and consistent. Then when I am clear and consistent, as in asking for some kind of substance to back up claims of reason’s moral utility, I get vapor and scornful invective.
Or when asking for evidence of my supposedly bigoted statements, just vapor and disappearance.
And now the thread’s pretty much run its course. Burps and snarls.
It is impossible to overcome arguments that disappear when they’re lost. But it’s fun to try. Up to a point. Only it’s not fun now. I like fun.
Sincerity is scorned, then humor is scorned, logic is abandoned when it leads to “wrong” conclusions. Or blanketed in lexically intricate smog.
Take the field. There’s no goalposts. We won!
Where this goes isn’t to freedom and acceptance.
Married gays isn’t freedom, isn’t liberation, it’s the illusion of freedom. Or the weightless seconds of a train wreck.
No more than legalized weed, held at the price point of illegality and taxed, is a victory.
It’s a scam masquerading as liberation. And it keeps people pacified and polarized.
No more than a mixed-race president means America is a racially better place than it was 50 years ago. Better for some for sure. Better on the surface. The n-word! No!
But not enough, and too many are still at the bottom. More toys, more distractions. More tokens.
And a body count that’s spiking, in an environment that’s degrading like it was on fire. The same illusion of progress that the black community has experienced is being drawn down on the legitimate struggle of the sexually marginalized. The ones with a loud enough economic voice anyway. Disillusion’s just around the corner.
The same easy stunt that got everyone thinking Obama was the answer to Bush, when he was just Phase 2 of the same operation.
Sophisticated manipulation of genuine anxiety. Russia hates gays! Women! Pussy Riot!
We hate Russia!
People who can’t think very well are being played, pushed into fighting each other, and bought off with trinkets and increased privilege.
Compassion and understanding are the only things that will work against that.

Hey, I liked most of your coherent post, Roy.

You’re drifting into timecube territory now, though.

but “scientific” in this sense is also heavily cultural

no kidding. I mean, the scientific consensus in Germany during the 1930s was that race-science was scientific. And in the 19th century, craneology was widely accepted as science. That makes bigotry more understandable—being a homophobe in the US in 1975 is a lot more understandable than in 2014, just as being a racist in 1875 is more understandable in 1975 etc. That still means people holding those views were bigots. Society in 1870 had a lot more bigotry than society today.

Bigotry too often gets defined by those powerful enough to insist on their definition of it. And the truly marginal get left out, or behind.

I certainly don’t hate Conor Friedersdorf, but no one thinks he is among the truly marginal.

Also, you see that dude in the dress in the video? Do you understand that his opponents won a financial settlement from a public broadcaster because he used the word “homophobic” in a way that offended them?

Yeah, sometimes scientists are acting on prejudiced bigotry, (as several people just said and you repeated just so you could feel self-important). At least as often, people oppose scientists out of prejudiced bigotry. How to know which side or sides are acting on bigoted ideas in any given instance? Let them both make a case for their positions and use our reason, intuition etc as best we can to decide between them.

Critically compare our belief systems, try new things, learn from our mistakes. If there’s a better way to go through life, Roy, you sure as hell haven’t told us what it is yet.

Doh. It’s not that real bigotry doesn’t exist. It is not always inaccurate to call it out.
It’s that the use of the term gets prioritized mainly by power.
And in this thread it was used wholesale to silence some serious statements and opinions, not always mine, or even mostly. “Let them both make a case for their positions” my ass.
The amount of idiotic dreck necessary to wade through here is amazing. But it’s started to be fun again, now that I got that Mengele thing coughed out.
Which was done to point out that placing scientific bigotry safely in the past is deceptive and dangerous. As though all that’s necessary now is to beat down those drooling fundamentalists and take our rightful places at the Eloi banquet table.
Sort of like how 12 Years A Slave is being used to gloss over the insidious systemic present-day racism of Hollywood and reassure its credulous naive customer base that the bad old days are over.
Not only are you full of shit about what I’m saying half the time but you’re full of shit about my motives for saying it too.
There’s something about getting lectured at by portentous fools persons that I’m starting to find agreeable though, even confirming.
I don’t know why. It shouldn’t be.

Doh.

Yeah, it is pretty fucking embarassing how you’ve repeatedly tried to silence people by defining who does and doesn’t get to define homophobia. People you define as “powerful”: Panti posting a video, us posting blog comments just like you–not allowed to define bigotry. People who are “marginal”–other people posting blog comments that you like–are allowed to define what bigotry is.

You’re doing it right now! It would be a lot funnier if it wasn’t so sick.

And in this thread it was used wholesale to silence

Pointing out homophobia is not silencing. It’s attempted silencing when you declare who is and isn’t allowed to call out homophobia. If someone thinks homophobia has been called unjustly, let them explain way. Let both sides make a case for their positions. If an amoral piece of nothing like Roy tries to silence either side, as is his gross habit, let him and his threats are both full of it. Let the record show that Roy has eviscerated absolutely no one, promises to the contrary notwithstanding.

Note, any other replies I make to you are just going to point out your repeated attempts to police who gets to define homophobia–if you’ll even allow anyone to use the word at all. (And for the record, I’m not defining homophobia–I think Panti’s definition is great. If you don’t think Panti is allowed to define it, fuck you very much.)

Not only are you full of shit about what I’m saying half the time

It’s not everyone else’s fault, Roy.

But it doesn’t say or do anything about the underlying causes.

Did you watch the whole video? It took a pretty good stab at it.

It’s not silencing debate for me to point out how absolutely disgusting it is for you silence debate–by defining who does and doesn’t get to use the word “homophobia”–in the context of that video. I mean, that’s not some random transcript I pulled from nowhere–that’s from the video in the OP you are posting comments under! Don’t talk about my “use of that testimony here”–the testimony was already here, waiting for you to press play for close to a week now.

*Great Internet Train Wrecks*

Read this thread, watch roy’s ego drag poor roy through an epic humiliation.

There’s something about getting lectured at by portentous fools persons that I’m starting to find agreeable though, even confirming.

Pain Body.

That makes bigotry more understandable—being a homophobe in the US in 1975 is a lot more understandable than in 2014, just as being a racist in 1875 is more understandable in 1975 etc.

If this is included in the definition of bigotry – holding a mainstream view supported by science, religion, and other authoritative social institutions today, that will be deemed despicable a hundred years from now – then yes, it’s bigotry. But that also means that all of us including the unpleasantly sanctimonious loudmouths in this thread are, in all likelihood, despicable bigots. Being human is being a bigot, or as Christians say: we are all sinners. Have you been to a Zoo? Have you passed by a homeless? Has someone ever served you food in a restaurant, only because she needed money to survive? And you believe it’s okay? 100 years from now you’ll be judged a savage and a bigot. Also, marriage itself, as we know it, will probably be long gone and forgotten.

I would think, if you want to preserve the negative connotation you need to define bigotry as an outdated intolerant attitude.

It seems to me like a lot of ‘confusion’ could be saved if the language around rights accorded or denied on the basis of sexuality were cleaned up a bit.

Like, if someone were to refer to a law or practice as ‘racist’, then that might mean that it was determined, framed or carried out by people who hate or dislike or hold unpleasant views about groups of people defined on the basis of ‘race’. But it might not — it might just be intended to flag up that the law/practice/whatever is discriminatory on a ‘racial’ basis. Regardless, I don’t think we’d object to someone who promoted, supported or introduced the law/practice being called ‘racist’. (Huh, though maybe we might object to them being presumed to be ‘a racist’, I dunno.)

But discussions around according equal rights on the basis of sexuality have to operate with the term ‘homophobic’, which seems to impute a mental state or set of attitudes. Maybe we need to try to expand it out? (Because I don’t think ‘sexualitism’ is gonna take off, or that ‘hetoronormativist!!!’ is gonna carry the correct degree of condemnation.)

As to Roy’s argument that people are going to be ‘bought off’ by same-sex marriage: I just don’t see that, I guess. I don’t think that 12 Years a Slave has led to many people buying into the idea of a ‘post-racial America’ who were a) not bought in already, or b) the kinds of people who are unlikely to be doing anything useful to advance the cause of non-white Americans anyway. ‘How far we’ve come’ is just something a not-very-bright person might say in an op-ed piece. (But perhaps not a substantially more hackneyed op-ed piece one than the one that argues about how dangerous it is to applaud an individualised story about slavery with a happy ending, because actually there’s still racism in America, would you believe.)

I mean, if you wanna go all the way and make a “no war but the class war”-type argument then that’s something else entirely, but the same-sex marriage debate cuts across class lines anyway (it’s not like we have two different working class groups who would otherwise be allied representing the frog and the tarantula or whatever it was), and it just seems odd to draw up the identity politics drawbridge HERE and say ‘no more!!!!!’ It’s a pretty fundamental issue, I think, and, you know, non-class identities are important to people too…

Wow – this thread has got to be nearing a record for concern trolling…I know that phrase will trigger several more pages of vituperative comments so have at it…:)