Talya wrote:
I think you missed his point. You'll disagree with his point (I could poke several holes in it if I felt like it), but you missed it.
Corolinth is basically stating that this is a case of Christians oppressing different Christians, with an unstated-but-implied "**** you all, suckers. You made your bed, now sleep in it."
And Corolinth is wrong. The fact that the mayor is a Christian also makes this no better, and if the mayor were an atheist or what the **** ever else its not like she would behave differently. People are people, and atheists are no less likely than anyone else to understand that the way to get what you want in western societies is to try to rules-lawyer what you want into being "freedom" and what you don't want into being "oppression". To make an MMO analogy, in the current meta, being the victim is the winning combo; if you don't do that you are Doing It Wrong.
No one should be surprised that Christians are trying to appear to be victims; they learned it from everyone else. In this case though, they actually
are and Coro is butt-hurt that it's actually true for once.
Quote:
My stance:
This isn't a religion issue, nor a separation of church & state issue.
This isn't a gay-rights issue.
This is a free-speech and the US constitution issue. If some jackass wants to get up on his soap box and proclaim how his Invisible Sky Bully hates me for putting my tongue in another woman's pussy, well, he's just as free to do that as he is to get up on his soap box and proclaim the earth is flat. I don't care; in both cases he's a **** idiot that isn't worth the carbon atoms in his body. All you do by trying to muzzle them is bring attention to their pathetic cause.
I'd generally agree, except that it's very much a separation of church and state issue right along with being a free speech issue. If "The government may not interfere with what a church preaches" is not a "separation of church and state" issue then nothing is.
I also find it amusing (this part is not directed at you) that the folks in Houston are looking at sermons on homosexuality in response to a law that allows people to use a bathroom based on what they claim to "identify" as. Gender identity is different from sexual orientation, but we've got this ever expanding LGBT<insert loads of additional letters here>/ "queer"/whatever it is this week movement that endlessly conflates them.
Gender identity issues are psychological/medical issues that require treatment of various intensity, at the high end involving significant reconstructive surgery. Gender identity issues can be and are treated by modern medicine and psychological science.
Sexual orientation, on the other hand is not a medical or psychological issue at all; no known treatment exists, and even if it did no treatment is
necessary. Homosexuality is a state of being, but it is not a medical or psychological problem.
It is perfectly understandable that a person might have no issue whatsoever with homosexual rights, same sex marriage, etc., or even transgendered people and issues, and still object to someone of the opposite sex using the same bathroom just because that person "identifies" as the same sex based on nothing but their say-so.
This action is picture0perfect leveraging of victim politics, as if a woman who doesn't want to pee in front of some fat neckbeard who claims to "identify as a woman", especially in the bus station at 2:00 a.m. is the product of some preacher hollering about the imagined sins of homosexuals. This is not actually about tolerance at all, but about manufacturing oppression to fight. If every church everywhere just face-heel-turned tomorrow and said "you know what, **** it, homosexuality is fine!!" these people would be utterly paralyzed. The entire issue is about tapping into anti-gay sermons to link that to people not wanting to pee in front of the opposite sex as if the two issues were somehow the same.