Going along with what you want me to do might make me “appear” more compassionate and tolerant, but if I think I am right, am I really being more compassionate to anybody, or less so?
Would you respect me more if I just floated along, following the crowd and the culture and whatever the latest trend in thinking is? That’s tempting and would be the easy thing to do I guess.
@LouKyDad - it’s unclear to me how professional staff in Bible (and their studies/publications) would be in any way indicative that the lay masses are readers of the Bible themselves, to answer a previous post of yours. My understanding is that fundamentalist Christians have been found, in studies, statistically unlikely to have read the whole Bible.
…
People are allowed to believe in any religion, or honestly, in any nonsense, that they would like. The wonderful thing about our Constitutional country is that we are supposed to have law and order (and schools!) independent of religion. And one of the other great things is this idea of one person’s civil rights not being squash-able by someone else’s opinions, even if that person can claim a majority.
When you posted your claim that it should be “your right” for your state (Kentucky?) to restrict gay marriage, it sounded to me like you haven’t thought about this from a gay person’s perspective at all. Homosexuality isn’t a theoretical construct that you can wish out of existence. How could it ever be your right to restrict another person’s civil rights?
Another way to think about it is this: it’s sheer chance that you were born the type of person whose relationship preference (straight, I’m assuming) - is privileged in our culture and history. It’s purely random that it’s not YOUR marriage that people might be voting in or out. Why should you keep that unearned privilege? (Some people, I guess, think that all unearned privilege should be kept, especially financial, but that’s another conversation for another time, as it’s not about civil rights or this book.)
fretfulmother - no reason to keep repeating myself here - #431 & #435. I would add only that everyone has always had the same right to be married. We have always been allowed to marry someone of the opposite sex. None of us have always had the right to marry someone of the same sex.
@Loukydad, Isn’t that kind of like saying we have always had the right to marry someone of the same race?
Loukydad – If, by your comment, you mean to suggest that you think it is a good idea for a gay man to marry a straight woman, then I have a book to recommend to you – Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.
Sue22 - Ok if I have to. Barrack and Bill both want to marry Michelle. If Barrack can and Bill can’t, someone has been discriminated against. If neither Barrack or Bill can marry Barney, then no one has. So no, not like it at all.
I’m growing up in a very Christian household (my dad was a reverend for a period of time) where I felt very uncomfortable telling my family that I was agnostic. I can only imagine what would happen if I had to disclose to them I was bisexual. When I came to this realization around 4th grade I cried every night thinking I was going to go to hell and be disowned by my family. Honestly throughout middle school I would have given anything to straight and I prayed night and day for God to take it away. Hell, even today I wish I was straight. I find it extremely disrespectful and ignorant for someone to act as if sexual identity is just a trend or something being thrown into the spotlight as if it isn’t a major identifying factor for millions of people, and a giant source of discomfort for teens living in the closet.
@LOUKYDAD can’t even fathom the fact that people are attracted to different genders, and barring them from getting married constitutes discrimination. His own scenario doesn’t make sense because Michelle can marry Bill but Barrack can’t. It’s not as if LGBT people are fundamentally different from straight people, or that laws and love affect us differently. We’re the same. The end.
And “Fun Home” is a book, the end.
nottelling - I wouldn’t advise a straight woman to marry a gay man either. If Mr. Bechdel wanted to be with a man, I don’t see how it helps for me to call it something it isn’t.
TheAtlantic: Big Hugs
Excellent Post.
Hugs for TheAtlantic 
Lou, the post you are attacking compares the relatively educated and relatively non-religious population of CC posters, with the whole population of conservative Christians. Your aggressive (and pompous) attack is logically baseless. There is a further problem, that scholarship in theological seminaries is not about seeking the truth, it is about confirming what you already believe to be true.
Supporting LGBTQ+people supports all our children and young people. It’s an inclusive rather than exclusive lifestyle choice. It creates a better world for all, a world where fourth graders don’t feel the necessity to be closeted. In spite of some posts here, I believe most colleges these days are very gay friendly, so that becomes less and less of an issue for all our kids. Our kids are changing the world. No one can stop them. They support each other. They don’t really need to worry what our generation thinks about all this.
“Observe the length of this list. Multiply it by what you gained in step one as far as your new sense of how much conservative Christian scholarship has been produced by the faculty at the SBTS alone.”
It doesn’t really matter, though, because none of that scholarship “proves” that the Bible is any kind of Universal Truth that should be applied to everybody. People can write and have written reams about Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Harry Potter, but those things are still fiction too.
It also doesn’t matter because even if everyone and their brother agrees that the Bible says “Gay sex / marriage is bad!” and repeats it 1,000 times – it’s completely irrelevant to our laws and government.
There’s this new historical revisionism that’s prevalent now – that suggests that our founding fathers were really Very Serious Christians who intended the Bible / Christianity to be the law of the land. This is often found in - let’s get real - the least sophisticated parts of our country, the states that lag the rest of the country in practically every measure of well-being. (This historical revisionism is also often accompanied by “the Civil War was fought over state’s rights and slavery had nothing to do with it,” which is equally ludicrous given the secession documents penned by the seceding states, but I digress.) I’m really sorry that there are uneducated people who think this way, and they sincerely may think it, but it doesn’t make them right, and it doesn’t obligate anyone else to treat What the Bible Says as being of any more importance than What Harry Potter Says.
Yep! My D is at Columbia and it is indeed required. Columbia has the Core so students pretty much know this will be the case before they even apply.
I think if the school wants to infuse the LBGTQ lifestyle and agenda (including nude pictorials of oral sex) into “required reading,” political correctness alone demands a balance and that Playboy or Hustler should also be required reading. The whole “equality” thing, you know . . . .
You’re so weird. The “opposite” of LGBT acceptance isn’t Playboy.
sorghum - if I said that the majority of people today who support same sex marriage and believe homosexuality is 100% biological, that those people have no idea what the real picture is in terms of the state of scientific research. They have never read anything on the subject, and wouldn’t understand what they were reading anyway. They form their view of it from a Lady Gaga song and the fact that President Obama is just a cooler cat then Mitt Romney. Everybody knows they were just “born this way”, you know just like the song says, right?
What do you think I am really implying?
– Much2learn
I’m certainly no academic, but endorsing these unsubstantiated allegations certainly doesn’t support the “relatively educated” premise that’s been bandied about. I won’t even touch the “anti-gay, anti-minority, anti-women” broadbrush, gratuitous mudslinging of Christians (oops, Conservative Christians) posted earlier in this thread.
I could try to agree with you. But then I read things like the Northwest Ordinance, which became law right around the time the first amendment sprang into existence, and I get really confused. In the context of how a state like mine could join the union, what am I supposed to think about this statement about education. “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Somehow then my unsophisticated, uneducated brain starts to question your premise. How could the people of this time, who wanted to keep religion far from government and public education, even make a statement like that? It is all so hard to understand. I would love it if you would enlighten me. Please slow down and use small words for me.
"- if I said that the majority of people today who support same sex marriage and believe homosexuality is 100% biological, that those people have no idea what the real picture is in terms of the state of scientific research. "
It’s completely irrelevant whether homosexuality is “born that way” or a chosen behavior.
(Of course, it’s hard to believe that people would willingly choose something that’s so vilified, that their families believe dooms them to hell, that puts them at danger for being beaten up, etc. And of course I couldn’t possibly “choose” to be attracted to women, and I’m doubting LouKydad could “choose” to be attracted to men. But I digress)
Either way, the actions of two consenting adults who love one another and desire to be committed - it’s just not any business or concern of mine what the specifics in the bedroom look like.
The only arguments you can come up with are that gay sex goes against (your interpretation) of God’s will - which of course is completely irrelevant to anything, since your conception of God’s will isn’t important to how this country is run unless you’re under the mistaken belief that Christianity is a more important religion and the rest of us should just bow to it – or, potentially, that gay sex is personally icky / repulsive / unnatural to you - to which my response is a lot of stuff people do in their bedrooms I don’t want to think about, so I don’t spend my time thinking about it.
It’s interesting how those who are so into the Meaning of Marriage never seem to want to make divorce illegal, or criminalize people living together in sin, or prohibit things like drunken-Las-Vegas-weddings. Amazing how they can comprehend the idea of “not for me, but that’s your business” for some things, but not for others.