Quote:
Originally Posted by filtherton
What I'm saying is that these people are bigots, and that they only embrace these ridiculous justifications for their bigotry to avoid admitting to being a bigot.
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Yeah, I got that. And unless you're intently watering down the word, you're wrong.
You could rephrase your absolute to 'most of these people', but I don't see how you'd manage to support that, either. Opposition to gay marriage just doesn't require intolerance toward other groups or opinions. It just doesn't.
They surely go hand-in-hand for some significant portion of the opposition, but that's about as much as one can say without guessing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Willravel
One could very easily read the Bible as a source of incredible bigotry without any watering down. It's blatantly sexist and racist, no two ways about it, and what little it does say about homosexuality isn't made clear beyond "it's an abomination". There's no argument made other than "God doesn't like it", and even those passages are highly suspect. Verses surrounding anti-gay verses are regularly ignored by all Christians (I don't need to repeat verses about shellfish), which leads me to suspect—though now know for sure—that the Bible is more often than not a thin veil covering just another case of "eww".
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We're not equating bigotry to "you shouldn't do that", are we? Because you shouldn't watch Carlos Mencia. Mencia is an abomination. Eww. Can you only be a bigot if you're intolerant toward something that isn't wrong?
It's certainly not a settled debate that the shellfish and homosexuality portions still had equal weight after the formation of the New Testament, but that's beside the point.
Invoking Bible verses does not in and of itself demonstrate bigotry. You can quote Leviticus all you want, but it's quite another thing to find Christians willing to carry out its advocated punishment. Given any one particular Christian, you might well make the case that they're cherry-picking from the Bible, but that's not equivalent to or implicative of bigotry. If they're still not displaying intolerance, they're still not displaying intolerance.
And here's a hint: intolerance can't simply mean disagreement put into political action at some other group's expense. Otherwise, just about everyone involved in politics - if not everyone - is a bigot. Intolerance has to mean more than that, or bigotry means too much and too little.
I intended to include all the idiot right-wing talking heads with that. ORly, Limbaugh, Beck, etc., anyone dogmatically spewing hatred as a representative of the dark far right.[/QUOTE]