Hot damn, gturner. Slow down! It's hard keeping up with you the way you move goalposts so fast...
I'd like to ask you one simple question though.
What right do you (or anyone else) have to tell anyone else how to live their lives? What right do you have to condemn someone else because of who they love?
I don't personally believe ANYBODY has that right, and I've yet to hear anything close to a reasoned or convincing reason to support such behavior. This is why I don't take you seriously, or your arguments in this thread seriously. This is why I think Dan Cathy and all those religious nutjobs who support his actions are selfish, hateful bigots. Nobody has ever been able to answer this question beyond referring back to the Bible - an ancient document told and retold and then written and rewritten throughout the ages, as if none of them are able to think for themselves. Fuck that.
Oh, I'm fence sitting on the issue. I personally don't think gay marriage would do any harm, and some of my gay friends have definitely been harmed by the lack of it (such as my caving partner who couldn't see his life-partner in the hospital as he was dying), but some of the people who initially pushed the issue in places like San Francisco got my hackles up because in the political environment they moved to and live in preaches social revolution by getting in peoples faces, overthrowing society, etc. It's another one of the accidents of history. If the gay marriage movement had started in Dallas, it would probably be legal everywhere by now.
So go ahead, tell me. Who gives you this right to dictate to any other living person who they should love or be able to marry? I honestly want to know, because as it stands, there's nothing that can be said that will trump the answer of "No one".
Actually, it's not so much as a right as the wisdom to avoid bad outcomes. There is a conservative thing that happens when a liberal starts adding more consequence processing to liberalism (which is what conservatism is, and why liberals tend to become conservative when they watch too many of their friends crash and burn).
Giving you some counter-examples that you'd probably agree with, in the same vein (and these will be over the top just to illustrate), what gives you the right to dictate what drugs a parent can shoot their children up with? Or what gives you the right to dictate that heroin and crack can't be sold on the street? etc. There are bunches of them, and of course it always ends with some argument about pedophilia freedom.
One of the basic additions to moral thinking that conservatives add to liberalism is that we go beyond the immediate consequences and free will of the parties directly involved (consent, reciprocity, fairness) and ponder indirect and later consequences (social cohesion, order, long-term effects). So free unlimited whiskey shots all night long, which everyone is for at the time, looks pretty bad in the morning. Free love and mass orgies sound great, and a year later (pre-contraception) there's a bunch of disputes, broken marriages, VD, and kids whose fathers will never be known.
Liberals do intuitively understand some of the obvious cases, like why they have the right to decree that a paranoid schizophrenic can't own an AK-47 with a drum clip, but they have trouble doing it without thinking that it should be some universal prohibition against the weapon and not the person, because they have trouble with the concept of saying that particular people aren't allowed to do particular things because it will likley end badly. But you can move the same argument into a different territory and and touch on the concept, such as saying that profoundly retarded people shouldn't be allowed to drive. Retarded people didn't control how they were born, and everybody should have a right to drive, but ... <thinks>... No, that would end badly.
The opposition to gay marriage comes from two places. One is the Bible and cultural mores and traditions (a reckoning for rejecting God's commandments, or an assault on our traditions), and the other is the feeling that it will end badly (social breakdown, changes in divorce laws which currently favor a mother's custody and give her a large part of her husband's estate and future earning, and kids raised in strange environments with unknown damage done to them).
With some state having passed gay marriage, the feeling that it will end badly will fade if such marriages don't routinely end badly (or significantly worse than the already abysmal rate of bad endings toi heterosexual marriages). As that becomes established, preaching against gay marriage based on the Bible will diminish (in numbers of sermons, congregations, and denominations) because it'll start sounding like sermons about why you're not allowed to rescue a sheep that's fallen down a well on the sabbath. "I rescued a sheep and the lightning did not strike."
There are already examples out there of countries and denominations who have allowed gay marriage and whose churches haven't been overrun with serpents and fire. Over time, as gay marriage becomes part of the landscape, opposition on traditional grounds fades because everyone grew up with it as being a normal part of the past, going back to the time before the Playstation 5.
At that point you've won. But you've won not throuh direct confrontation and demands (though those would've played a role in the initial victories), but by being in part what naval strategists would term "a fleet in being" (You're out there, you exist, and attacking you would have unknown repercussions and casualties) and being in part just a part of the landscape, not doing any harm to anyone, not creating any problems, and not bringing about any of the things that fire-and-brimstone preachers had predicted till they were red in the face.
All this will take a little time, and though you're probably tempted to rush it, pushing too hard will harden the opposition that you're trying to seduce. But not pushing at all won't change the status quo, though standing on the gains you've already won is advancing your long-term cause.
Going back to MLK, Civil Rights, tactics,strategy, and time-tables: He certainly wasn't the first black leader to look around and see the unfairness. He was certainly the first to with the plan and the team to win a championship victory (sports analogy). Could he have done it back in the 1930's or 40's? Would the victory have happend without him or much effort on anyone's part by the 1980's? What is the fastest achievable timetable for that struggle, and the gay marriage struggle? It's a fascinating question to ponder, and it leads you to other questions.
The Deep South, Texas, and heavily hispanic areas in the Southwest will probably be the last to fall.
Side note: Hispanic values are culturally very similar to 1940's Americans, which I only bring up because Europeans point to it to contrast our assimilation of Hispanics to their assimilation of Muslims. In essence, we're assimilating WW-II veterans who went through a time machine and came out speaking a different language, and theyr'e assimilating people from an alien culture.
The Southern battleground will produce defeats for gay rights for quite some time after the North East, Northern Midwest, and West Coast have come around. Then they'll start feeling backwards and topple like dominoes when everyone least expects it, as long as the rest of the country doesn't become to obviously and frighteningly weird.
Putting the issue to them before they're ready will probably produce legislative or state constitutional losses that will require a greater majority percentage to undo, delaying the victory by several years. Some of that can't be avoided, because winning in a place like Vermont will cause Baptists in Alabama to advance bills to "make sure it doesn't happen here!"
Still, eventual victory is probably certain, and it's just a question of how fast and which losses and delays you can avoid. That question is one of reading the populace, nudging their opinions, and strategy.
Because here's the thing: I don't give two shits if you or Dan Cathy or any of the religious right disagree with equal marriage. I don't care if you think it's a sin or if it's unnatural. You are free to think whatever ass-backward thoughts you want to think. I'd prefer we were all a little more decent and reasoned, but whatever. Years of watching the GOP and the religious extreme have left me cynical.
No, the only problem I have is when you take YOUR beliefs, YOUR standards, and YOUR faith and try to impose it on other people.
But you do that too, or you wouldn't oppose pedophilia or necrophilia. I mean come on, "necrophilia is a victimless crime!" (I've always wanted to go into some tiny little backwards town and slap that as a bumper sticker on some hearse, right before a funeral. You have to admit, it would be funny as hell.)
That is NOT a right any person should have over another.
That is not a right any group should have over another.
But there are cases where you should, and even that you'd agree with, such as a schizophrenic neighbor with an AK-47, a freaky dude with a cult, and lots and lots of other bizarre and disturbing behaviors, from Aztec sacrifice to bad lawn care habits and three rusting Trans Ams buried in weeds in the back yard.
Until you nutjobs on the right can find a way around that, you're going to hear all kinds of protests, all kinds of complaints and it is the right of those people protesting and complaining to make those protests and complaints heard, because we're supposed to live in a country where there's a clear and defined separation between the church and state and we're also supposed to be living in a country where there is freedom from persecution based on race, creed, or orientation.
But at present, you're by and large not being persecuted (I won't argue that high-school kids aren't vicious persecutors, nor the frequent ass-hole, who inflict tremendous and long-lasting damage). You're in a transitional state, not quite fully trusted with some tasks (and marriage is a task, which makes me wonder why men haven't figured out how to ban the damn institution), but trusted with almost everything else. Much of both the right and left views marriage as an enormous and difficult responsbility (probably from bitter experience that totally sucked).
There's some concern (over-cautious, I admit) similiar to what we place on jet aircraft pilots regarding eye-sight, inner ears, heart, health, etc. To fly a military or civilian jet aircraft, you can't really deviate much from the norm or people raise concerns. Alan Sheppard, Wally Schirra, and Deke Slayton were at times deemed an unacceptable risk for the task they pursued, and we over-cautiously limited them. But you can't say they were
persecuted, they just weren't cleared for flight status.
On the one hand it's safe and logical. On the other hand, a crack whore with three murder convictions who talks to Jesus is cleared for married status. It will change, but the wheels of government and opinion grind slowly, so slowly that you don't think they're moving, but they are.
Making them grind faster is why I keep bringing up strategy and tactics.
For example, all that Pilgrim chicken you eat. You don't have massive numbers for a boycott of an end-distributor, as Chick-Fil-A showed. But if you found that Pilgrim or some other wholesaler was discriminating against gays, you could boycott their
customers, places like KFC or Wendys. Even if the boycott itself was small, it would be measurable, much like the boycott's of chains who were buying chickens raised or slaughtered inhumanely.
A tiny little bit of pressure and press on a restaurant chain, and then the wholesaler's competitor (Tyson etc) get wind of it (not that you'd ever e-mail a coproration, cough cough). Then their top salesmen with gold cuff-links pay a visit to Wendys or KFC and say "Look, some of your customers are uncomfortable with Bo's stand on this issue, and it's hurting your sales. We'd be happy to supply you with chicken and a competitive price, and we're working on a new initiative where you could even advertise "free-range" chicken." The suits with the cuff-links are doing your job for you, like puppets. As you question their companies policies, they'll bend over backwards to appease you to make sure they can maintain their competitive edge in negotiations with the franchise, because they're seeing dollar signs.
Two or three chains that switch wholesalers because of a tiny bit of pressure (and circling sharks swarming in from the competition), and the board room down at Big Chicken starts seeing major contracts being yanked and given to competitors. A 1% effect at a major restaurant chain is a 5% or 10% hit on the distributor. The board makes the founder back off, and you not only get a much larger victory directly, but you've got all the franchises trying to exploit their new-found gay-rights love in their advertising campaigns.
There are many permutations, but you can easily game this out and see where you can apply pressure most easily, where business competition will multiply that pressure for you, and where whole consumer oriented industries will jump on board as a marketing edge (similiar to organic, low fat, or vegan). You don't have to engage in a war of attrition when outnumbered badly when you can co-opt the existing competitive tensions and make the big players pander to you as their marketing edge.
You can turn the tables on companies like Chick-Fil-A, dramatically, and achieve more than you imagined, but you attacked from the wrong direction.
