General Chat / San Francisco Allows Gay Marriages

Why is it that reasonable arguments get you nowhere as far as changing people's opinions when certain issues are at stake? If abortion, gay rights, etc. are problems that could be solved by rational thinking they would have been solved a long time ago. And yet the same arguments just keep coming up over and over again. There's a philosophical debate going on over this issue. It seems to me (and don't kill me here, I'm stating an opinion which I know could be volatile) that the problem is people refusing to submit to reason. If the problem were that simple though it would not have lasted for some thousands of years of human history. Is there a natural progress of human thinking which is coming closer to a point where people can think for themselves or will certain arguments on moral principles never end? How much should we trust our feelings on issues at the cost of rational thinking? I guess these are all just retorical questions.

I'm with Freak, this is my last post in this topic as well.

Look, all I said was sodomy is a sin. I don't believe in it, so I don't support gay marriage at all. I never said I hate gay people, simply that I disagree with homosexuality and gay marriage.

I don't want to start all these arguments, so there is no need to call me ignorant and such. Why can't someone have a different opinion than everyone else on these boards and not be flamed for it? I tried to post my opinion in the most unoffensive manner possible and still I get called names for it. Not being for gay marriage does not make me ignorant, close minded or the such, it is simply my opinion. I don't care how I came to that opinion, it's mine and I am sticking to it.

'Trix, I'm probably one of the most down to earth guys you will ever meet. I didn't mean to give you the impression that I dislike gays, as I have the most upmost respect for you. I hope this doesn't make you think any less of me.

Opinions are meant to be changed. If you go into an argument with the attitude that you won't change your mind no matter what then you're wasting everyone's time.

As far as sodomy and the Bible, it was written in a different language thousands of years ago. There is a field of study called etymology that is devoted to the origin of words. Sodomy was not even a word in the English language until some time around 1000 AD. The word sodomy was defined as perverse sexual practices and the root of the word comes from the Hebrew town of Sodom as referred to in the Bible. Who decides which sexual practices are considered perverse? Well the originators of the word do. Around 1000 AD western Europe is very much under the influence of the Catholic church. To say that Sodom was destroyed because the people living there practiced sodomy is a logical fallacy. That's like changing my name to Jesus and then deciding that because my name is Jesus I must be the son of God. Any legitimate religious scholar would tell you the same thing.

All Blitz was saying is that the Bible was not written in English. There is no way to translate text from one language to another without changing the meaning in at least some minor way. On top of that, the connotations of words change over time. The issue is not what's written in the Bible, it's how you interpret it. To read a line of text which was written in a different language centuries ago and extract meaning from it based on the modern connotations of the words is ignorant. Historians do a lot of research in order to interpret ancient documents. This is becuase it's easy to make the wrong assumptions if you are not familiar with the culture that existed at the time a document was written. The same should be expected of all texts unless you believe the Bible is so sacred that it was translated perfectly and in such a way that the words written centuries ago carry the same connotations today.

I suppose a lot of people do believe that. This is why I reminded you that the Greeks believed the muses spoke through the oral poets the history of the Greek gods as they appear in Homer. They thought their holy books (actually they were oral poems not books. Greece was an oral culture until late in its history) came directly from the gods. Do you understand that, they BELIEVED it with the same conviction that you believe. If you told them that maybe Zeus wasn't real they would say yeah right, I know what I believe and this is true. They would be absolutely sure of it because generations before them had the same belief. They were just as sure of their beliefs as you are. But were they wrong? If you think so (and obviously you do if you are a Christian) than can't you at least admit that there is a possibility that you are wrong too? If you admit this and continue to believe that is your choice. If you don't admit this, well that's what I mean by being ignorant.

*sigh*

Choosing to quit an argument because you're offended is nothing to be praised for. Look, I really don't want to insult people but if they choose to be insulted I can't help it. Backing out of an argument only shows that you can't respond to the issues. I don't want people to quit, I want them to keep arguing until we find a solution.

What goes through your head when you read what I write? Do you think "this guy is misguided"? Do you read the words I'm saying or just glance at them and dismiss them? I really am curious. I'm not anti religion by any means. Religion has a very important place in human life. I'm just against people who make no effort to understand the world. You NEVER form an opinion and stick to it. All through life you NEED to question your beliefs. Test every new experience, every new piece of information against your beliefs and see if they hold up. If you do this, than you have true faith. Not the faith of the ignorant, but the faith of the wise.

I'm back to feeling like Socrates again. His goal was to convince people that Homer was not a valid basis for thinking. He was trying to get people to think rationally instead of thinking in terms of "this is what Zeus did, so it must be morally right." Socrates was executed for standing up to his culture and asking them to start thinking for themselves instead of blindly following old customs. So was Jesus. It's an interesting comparison. It's shows you the universality of human ignorance.

What's the point of arguing something if their not gonna change their minds? Let the people believe what they want. This debate is geting nowhere.

Thank you Ed, for bringing the translation issue to the forefront. As an example, I offer this. On the flight from JFK to SFO today, the in flight movie was "Intolerable Cruelty", a lighthearted piece of fluff with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones. However, looking at the Spanish translation directly below the English title Intolerable Cruelty, was the film title in Spanish "El Amor, un Nuevo Distracion", which translates in English to "Love a new distraction", far from Intolerable, and hardly cruel. So...........linguistics aside, I am very sad for this country in it's closed minded views.

Dawg.......you're not who I thought you were......I still thought you believed in equality for all......screw me once......shame on you......screw me twice.....shame on me.........You have exhausted your "twice".



I'm done.

What's the point of arguing when they're not going to change their minds?

When you have something to say, you feel like you need to say it whether people will listen or not. I refuse to give up on people. Yeah I said I gave up before but that was only in a moment of weakness. Some times love is painful. It's only because I love people so much that I keep talking even when they tell me to stop. That probably sounds incredibly presumptious but I'm far from the point of caring about that anymore. I don't have an ego about this. It's what I'm saying that matters, not who's saying it. And I'm daring someone to convince me I'm wrong because as I just said, beliefs are meant to be changed. I hope that I'll be able to change mine when it becomes clear that I need to.

I'm kind of with everyone else in that I'm pretty much done posting here. I just have a few more things to say.

Freak...respecting your right to hold an opinion and respecting your opinion are different issues. I do respect your right to have an opinion, but when it is hurtful, unequitable and discriminatory I decline respecting that opinion. I think you are blatantly wrong on this issue and your arguments against gay marriage are shallow and for the most part unsupported.

Ed...I understand it's frustrating trying to argue about an issue when the other side merely falls back on 'it's a sin' as their constant retort. If it makes you feel any better, if you have opened the mind of one person who has read this topic you have done a good thing and your arguments have not been in vain. Never count yourself out.

Meretrix...I'm truly sorry that this is even an issue for you. It should not be. Unfortunately, we do not have the issue completely sorted out in Canada yet either, but it seems like it is very close. At that point in time, we'd love to have you! If your ever in Saskatoon, come to my restaurant, I'll but you lunch.

I'm done here. Good luck to all Americans in getting this right.

Boobs, blood and Bible-bashing

Bare breasts are exponentially more offensive in America than freely-flowing blood and gore, says John Patterson

Friday February 20, 2004
The Guardian
 
Here we go again with the same old hypocrisy. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, which features a fair acreage of flesh, and whose politics are avowedly of the 1960s left, gets slapped with an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board, thus guaranteeing a drastic narrowing of its audience and a lowering of its profitability. Meanwhile, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a medievally reactionary Bible-basher drenched in the literal blood of the mythical Lamb, featuring extensive, non-sex-related applications of scourge and lash, close-ups of nails being hammered through flesh, and a bloody spearing or two, gets pushed out to 3,000 screens nationwide under the more inclusive R-rating, which means newspapers will carry its ads, and children will be allowed to see it.
Now I don't think The Passion should be rated NC-17. After Saving Private Ryan, that would be ridiculous and unfair. I think the NC-17 rating should be abolished outright. I have to wonder, though, why a few tits, willies and pubes are exponentially more offensive to the MPAA than freely-flowing blood and gore.

Oh, I forgot: this is 50-50 America, where each film has the capacity to inflame precisely the audience that will never go to see it. The Dreamers offers a full menu of likely offences to the right: the whiff of incest and possible bisexuality, bare breasts and bottoms, and, possibly worst of all, the temerity to believe that 1968, the year of the barricades, was a great time to be alive. This was never going to fly in the America of the attorney general John Ashcroft, who draped curtains over the naked breasts of the mural of Justice, and who deep in his heart probably thinks women - even fully clothed women - should be confined to a world of burkas, bound feet and boiling cabbage.

The Passion is much more in Ashcroft's line. After all, he took his oath of office while being anointed by a priest "in the style of the ancient kings of Israel". So it's to be expected that, while atheists and Jews will decry much of The Passion, Ashcroft's America - or the largely southern section of it that believes God wrote the Bible on a cloud up in Heaven and that Satan is a real guy with a tail - will eat it up. And culture-war issues like gay marriage keep cropping up to remind them that they live in a modern Babylon - not unlike the ancient one whose current occupation they endorse - and that The Passion will offer the perfect antidote to the torrents of filth that assail them in these pre-Rapture end-times.

Religion has always been the tightest alibi for sex and violence. Cecil B DeMille knew that a holy story was the best cover for the unveiling of a few topless slave-wenches. William Wyler's Ben-Hur got away with showing an arm being severed onscreen because there was all that serious God-bothering to come in the final reel. Judging by the number of churches and pastors who have block-booked cinemas for weeks to ensure their flocks have no excuse to dodge Gibson's celluloid proselytising, The Passion will sail by on the same criteria. It seems like an awfully long time since we saw Mary Magdalene's nipple in The Last Temptation of Christ.

The censorious urge is rampant in America, thanks to the exposure of the more secular nipple of Janet Jackson. This ridiculous kerfuffle has exposed the line that divides the tittie-centric and tittie-phobic constituencies of the Republic. It has highlighted the long-term coarsening of America and the corrupt relationship between the TV networks and those who regulate their business and censor their output at the Federal Communications Commission.

I half-accept the complaints about the nipple-effect in MTV's unspeakably tacky Superbowl half-time show. The Superbowl is a family affair in the same way that Thanksgiving is, so a popped boob is as inappropriate as it would be during the Queen's Christmas address. Almost no one has commented on how disturbing it was in other ways. No matter how rehearsed the act was, Justin Timberlake looked like a man sexually harassing a woman - and a white man harassing a black woman, to boot. Jackson looked shocked, even if she was faking it.

The TV networks have always been weird about boobs, though. When I moved here in the late 70s, it was nearly a year before I spied a naked breast on network TV: when I did see one, it was being amputated. The rest of the half-time show was apparently aimed at 14-year-old white male suburban rap-fans - no-hope virgins who dream of installing a stripper's pole in their cribs and who are too young or chicken to rent proper porno. If you lower your standards to appeal to this brain-dead demographic you'll get everything you deserve.

The result has been the censoring of TV shows containing so much as a nanosecond of nudity, and the enforcement of a five-second delay on live transmissions. I'll be interested to see what that five seconds does to our chances of hearing any Michael Moore-style dissent at this year's Oscars.

Equally offensive has been the sight of FCC chairman Michael Powell ragging on network executives for their perceived unwillingness to stem the tide of TV filth. This is the man who engineered the FCC ruling that - had it not been slapped down by an angry public - would have abolished limits on media ownership. It was a depressing little ritual: Powell, after all, is in the job to serve the corporations, not the public, so going through the motions of biting the hand the feeds him was the emptiest form of political grandstanding. The networks, on the other hand, beleaguered by cable and satellite and facing an ever-shrinking audience, need Powell's approval for mergers and expansions, so they will cravenly acquiesce to his demands for self-censorship.

In Hollywood meanwhile, the MPAA's search for a replacement for its ancient chairman Jack Valenti goes on. We dodged a bullet, though, when Republican Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin decided he didn't fancy the job, which involves both lobbying in Washington on behalf of the studios and censoring their cinematic output. He was apparently more interested in cosying up to the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America - the lobby group for whom he gamed the recent Medicare Reform Act. Tauzin might charitably be described as a redneck, and comes from the most reactionary part of America. His political activities have substantially enriched the telecom and media conglomerates - he's been called their "wholly owned subsidiary" - so he'd have made an effective pimp for the studios in DC, but God only knows what his tenure would have done to censorship. Counting our blessings should be easy - because there's really only the one.

I thought this was interesting.

okay...so MDawg...you beleive that homosexuality is a sin and therefor they shouldn't be granted legal rights.

Why don't you go ahead and make that ever dangerous pre-maritial sex illegal? ITS THE END OF MORALS OMG!! Blow jobs: illegal! Anything other than missionary: illegal! Cigarettes and Booze (that worked real well): illegal!

The fact of the matter is, I don't care if 99.5% of America feels that something is immoral. If the 'immoral' act is committed by consenting adults harming or potentially harming no one who does not wish to participate, so be it. ESPECIALLY if you are legislating morality in a manner that is discriminatory and violating the constitution.

Is it THAT important to stop gay people from having rights that you are willing to change America's most precious document? Does it "hurt" anyone?

These people against gay marriage are just feeling power hungry. That they can decide
if we should have gay marriage or not. You people need to get your heads out of your assese and release that everyone is different and everyone deserves the same rights.

Fucking bible or any religious book brings nothing good to us humans. All it brings is hate towards the people the book says is a sin. Fucking hell. The bible said this. The bible said that. It's not your mother. Make up your own mind.

has anyone heard anything about the trials?

It's shows you the universality of human ignorance.

As quoted from Albert Einstein: ''Human stupidity is forever''.

And yes, I'd like to hear of the trials.

lets just all get along, i'm sorry for what has been said.

Now that I'm back, there's no way I'm reading 10 pages of this. So this is what I'm guessing happened, in this topic:

People say "yay" for gay marriage. Other people say that it is disgusting, some people using the "God hates fags" argument. Rebuttal by pro-gays saying it doesn't matter and they deserve their rights. Rebuttal by anti-gays saying that it's a sin or that gays are retarded. This continues. People get called bad names. People get bored and quit topic. Discussion of how this type of topic never changes anyone's opinion. More insults thrown. I make a post with all the intelligence and reason of PymGuy. I am rightfully "flamed". Topic closed.

Now that I'm back, there's no way I'm reading 10 pages of this. So this is what I'm guessing happened, in this topic:

People say "yay" for gay marriage. Other people say that it is disgusting, some people using the "God hates fags" argument. Rebuttal by pro-gays saying it doesn't matter and they deserve their rights. Rebuttal by anti-gays saying that it's a sin or that gays are retarded. This continues. People get called bad names. People get bored and quit topic. Discussion of how this type of topic never changes anyone's opinion. More insults thrown. I make a post with all the intelligence and reason of PymGuy. I am rightfully "flamed". Topic closed.

Holy shit.
I didn't realize we were that predictable.

This shit has happened many times before, it's wasn't that hard to figure it out.

I'm gonna try to make this my last post, i've taken about 2 days to think about it.
anyone whos'e against this marriage might as well read this.

I want the name Marriage be changed to Civil Unions, BECAUSE of this reason, i do believe that MOST people deserve the right to be with someone, and i want the Church, Synogoges, Mosques, Temples etc. handle marriages on the community level.

I'm not going to start the religion part because you've (speaking to gays here) know it, and you've heard so many times.

On a purely athiestic level, i'll say this, if the world which is built upon the theory of evolution and that any natural creatures ENTIRE point of existence is to pro-create so that their species continues on rather then die off, would make the logical assumption that all animals are hetero (which is true because i havent seen homosexual animals and if their were, i would be bound to find it). BUT all creatures have sometimes defects, humans get szchophrenia (Beautiful Mind) and other mind diseases, szchophrenia is purely a conciesnce attacking itself. now just say for moment, just for a moment that homosexuality IS genetical, it is not proven as of late, it would be considered that this is a gene-defect, its politically incorrect but its true. all animals (including humans) need to reproduce to keep the species alive. If it is a hormonal im-balance in the brain, their is always a perversion of state of mind, even those who are szchitzo males act a little quirkie around heterosexual males, i'm not saying all homosexual act flamboyant as they like to show on TV but their is a difference of set of mind compared to heterosexuals, almost women-like you can say. Ofcourse their are always the few people who flip into each other areas (het/hom) more often then not is still a difference in the mind-sets of both of them.

Now, like i'm thinking as of late, if gays DO get right to marry each other under the name marriage. What will this hold for future generations?
go back 40yrs it'd almost unheard of to marry another person for a different religion or a different race. in the year 2004 the only boundry our young generation has yet to think of the norm is sexual oppennes. Try to think of great grand children of this world to grow up dateing the same sex simply because it is now seemed as ok, that is a social norm? what ramifications will it take on societies of the future? is that moral principal based on sexuality needs to stand? i believe it does.

Beastiality is the next step, your all laughing now at this. Still take yourself back 40yrs nobody pictured that homosexuals would be like THIS (flamboyant or not) on television, magazines, etc. in fact they were invisible to society back then. hence "in the closet" term comes. still laughing? take yourself back to Jewish times, their are some evidence of homosexuality, AND beastiality back then. In Africa today, some children have sex with goats, why? because they wont get AIDS or other diseases that way. If in 20-40years from now, the even smaller group of beast-sexual people come up fighting for their rights to be with their animals, will you still say "well societies changing"? Ofcourse i'm putting this in some extreme view point, and try to remember that but also take into consideration...
The human mind is always pushing its limits, if homosexuality is seen as the norm, "well what would set me different" question arises, or "what happens if i do this", their is always gonna be a constant change, even you Coaster Ed know it, but does that make it right? Their must be a status quo at a certain point.

and i think you become homosexual OR heterosexual during and/or after puberty, reason why? i'll bring my own personal "feelings" out, i am hetero, but i perfer really tall girls. I don't know what it is, its really weird to some folks, i'm not always going after them but i'm always attracted to them. That could be taken the same way for gays now could'nt it? you can't actually disagree with this can you?

Blacks rights with Whites is different from homosexuality rights, and you should not compare the two, blacks have been fighting for rights through blood, sweat and tears for hundreds of years, fighting in 4 major wars without the respect that they truly deserved. Gay Rights movement has only begun in the last 20 years, and picked up speed in the last 7years, no one has been throwing you into slavery, you all have jobs that paid you well enough as long as the rule "don't ask, don't tell" applied and nobody thought differently about you, which did for so many years, only now do you feel your being left out and so deserve this? what difference is this to the mind-set of a beast-sexual person in Norway who was fighting for rights in 60's and 70's? If it dosen't end now, where does it?

purely and in essence i've stated what i would like to see.
Equal rights for homosexuals in the part for taking care of partners, inhertance, etc. etc.
lower the tax on them when they make a union together in front of a judge.
If must re-name the law of "marriage" to "Civil-Union"

If you had your feelings hurt, well you know i can't help that. I'll never in my eyes accept Rob and Matt Schnieder as an actual married couple, and i'll tell you this much, i'll probably die believing that. Nor do i want to see homosexual get charged on taxes higher then any normal person, and i do wish for homosexual partners to have the ABILITY to take care of their partners for their lifetimes.

God Bless, and good night..

P.s. sorry for the bad grammer but i'm not gonna check my commas over this huge post.

So what your saying is we should let the gays suffer and feel dircrimenated against and then feel sorry for them? I am sorry but your entire post was a load of bullshit and I feel you are wrong in every aspect.