I see that now and you are correct, my mistake.

As for the topic at hand I agree with this article-

Not another word...

For the record, I was the one who brought up the issue of legitimacy. I was arguing that the refusal to broaden the definition of marriage as "one man and one woman" to include "one man and another man" and "one woman and another woman" implies that these latter types of relationships are illegitimate (both legally and socially/sexually). It says, "You can't get married because you aren't a real couple." And since marriage is often viewed as a kind of social acceptance of a couple, barring gays and lesbians from marriage suggests a social denial of gay and lesbian couples as a legitimate unit suitable for long-term monogamy around which a family may be built.

Is it applicable to internet fora that if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all? Or is flaming of bigots tolerable?

We like to call it polite, if energetic, re-education, Jozrael.

You can flame on the internets... just not on this site.

This article is so blatantly wrong on so many topics, I don't even know where to begin.

I'll just start with this. Obviously, this guy never decided to bother to learn a lick about Christian theology, otherwise he would know that Levitical (Probably not a word, but whatever) law is divided into civic law, ceremonial law and moral law. Civic law applies only to Jews, ceremonial law is no longer applicable (That is, we don't have to offer up a ram and go to a Levi priest to atone for our sins) and moral law applies to, well, morals and is still valid today. If there are no propositions on eating shellfish and wearing different types of clothes, it's because there's no reason for there to be.

(Overly simplified, but you get the point.)

No, it's not. Apparently, he never read the NT.

Edit: And, no, David was not gay. That's eisegesis at it's worst to suggest as much. And I *think* he had something like 13 wives, though it was probably more. Not totally sure :P

Shellfish abomination: civic, ceremonial or moral? Now prove it.

Well since there's no props on shellfish why are there ones on homosexuality?

And how do you know whether or not David was gay?

I've heard David and Jonathan called the greatest human love story in the Bible. :)

That about sums up organized religion (if you by "worst" you mean "most extreme").

I'm not 100% certain, though I believe it's classified as a civic law. I'm not sure if the Jews still practice it, though. I'm sure someone who is Jewish can weigh in.

And, this is off-topic, but I'd like to know what you think about this. How long do you think it'll be until a gay couple tries to sue a church for refusing to marry them?

I, for one, and shocked and outraged that religious groups aren't allowed to commit unlawful discrimination in their capacity as landlords... I am fairly certain that the next logical step will be for satan to sue the church for being a bunch of meanyheads.

:rolleyes:

So, I'm willing to grant you a second chance at providing a non-stupid response. Care to take it?

The stupidity of my response was in direct proportion to the stupidity of your insinuation.

I"m just gonna let this one go..... but do me a favor filth - the whole conspiracy thing with liberals trying to be conservatives, because you can't see the point I made with that when I brought it up, there's no need to get all happy with it.

Though I can see why you did, nice execution. I'll bite my tongue on the rest.

You can't sue an exclusive club for not allowing you in for your believes, skin color or who you sleep with. See the Boy Scouts of America for proof, along with Shoal Creek Golf Club in Birmingham, AL. Churches most definitely fall into that catagory. They are under no duress to admit anyone as a member of the congregation.

So how long will it take? Never. There's plenty of precedence in the judicial system to prove that.

Next?

I'm with the board's status quo on Prop 8, and I'm far from shocked, but I'm about as outraged as I can be about something that probably won't ever affect me - unless it does so positively. The landlord should absolutely be able to discriminate against homosexuals. Or drug users. Or black people. Or cable news pundits. Or Carlos Mencia fans. It's his property. He's entitled to be an idiot with it. Most issues are pretty complex, with hidden and obvious nuances. This is not one of those issues.

(I do not mean to place homosexuals, black people, and drug users on the same level as those other two, by the way.)
-----Added 3/1/2009 at 03 : 15 : 34-----
And this would be sufficient if it were a simple process to become an 'exclusive club' and if no property owner were barred from the process.

In other words, if that part of civil rights dogma lost all its teeth.

FTA, laws against tenant discrimination came about as a direct result of the market's failure to control the distribution of rental units in a satisfactory way.

If private businesses want to operate in public, they need to behave in ways acceptable to the general public.

True, but the First Amendment provides a lot of protection for churches. They are under no obligation to admit anyone, which is why Mathew Hale and his ilk were able to practice their hatred under the sign of the cross with no worries about being shut down.

Read: because we didn't like the way other people used their property.

Childishness dressed up in language designed to assume a right to an apartment without forthrightly - and honestly - stating that assumption. It's a 'failure' because you wanted it to happen and it didn't. 'Failure' doesn't mean very much more than "something else happened" in that context.

Until, of course, you find yourself disagreeing with the general public. Hence, the lawsuits.

If a newspaper doesn't like a private business, it can refuse advertising space. Potential tenants can boycott. The general public can avoid and badmouth to its heart's content - and I'd normally be right there along with them. But if a tenant still wants to rent from the bigot down the street, that's none of the general public's business. Or yours.

I prefer a much less tyrannical majority.

No, it was a failure because entire neighborhoods were being segregated by racist landlords. That's not how a free market ought to operate. That's not how a free nation ought to operate. Everybody has a right to be a bigot. But, renting property is a responsibility, and part of that responsibility is not discriminating against people for being the wrong color or for wanting to bone the wrong gender of person.

People have collectively decided that their right to live somewhere regardless of the color of their skin trumps a landlord's right to deny someone a lease because of the color of their skin. It's a pretty simple choice.

Property rights don't exist in a vacuum.

It is the public's business. When the collective action of a bunch of racist landlords begins to affect people who have nothing to do with said racist landlords, then it becomes the public's business. Renter's rights laws came about because landlords were being douchebags, and that douchebaggery became such a huge problem that lawmakers were persuaded to act. In other words: landlords had the right to rent to whomever they wanted, but couldn't handle it, so that right got taken away. That's often what happens when people can't exercise their unenumerated rights in responsible ways; they lose those rights.

Perhaps the founders were a bit shortsighted in that they specifically failed to include the right to discriminate against entire classes of people when they drafted the bill of rights. Perhaps they believed that the ownership of property shouldn't guarantee the absolute right to do whatever one wants to do with that property.

I prefer much more realistic limitations on property rights.

Strawmanning my argument is a poor way of shrouding "we didn't like the way they used their property" without a real defense.

It's a dangerous definition of 'affect' that includes the withholding of privileges that you were never entitled to. Red Cross should totally sue me for not being generous with them.

Plainly false. People like you couldn't handle it. They handled it in a morally terrible way, but they handled it just fine. Others like you couldn't handle the way they handled it and had a legislative tantrum.

There are plenty of ways in which we are allowed to be irresponsible and SHOULD be allowed such. We draw the line - responsible people do, anyway - at where such irresponsibility deprives someone of something they are entitled to, and no further. We don't redraw the line simply when we don't get what we wanted.

They also failed to include gay marriage. Guess this thread is pointless.

Again, no one is arguing for an absolute right. Try switching out your easy one-liners for something relevant.

I think you chose 'realistic' because it looked pretty in that sentence. I can't fathom how it actually applies to your view in a way that excludes mine.

Says you. Run your own property differently.

FoolThemAll

Are we to understand that this:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3102/...ff1900.jpg?v=0

is an acceptable reality in your world view?

Where's it installed?

FTA, if you want to have this discussion I suggest you open it up in its own thread.

the fact you'd even ask the question tells me everything I need to know

Looks like there's no point for a new thread, filth. The debate's been settled already, with a well-reasoned and totally-NOT-lazy conclusion.

LOL

disagreeing with FTA = lazy and poorly reasoned. gotcha.

Is there a sale on straw this week?

#226 is lazy. Unreasoned, rather than poorly reasoned. Much like #228, except without the misrepresentation. Filth disagreed with me, but filth wasn't lazy. You were.

Well, I guess it took some effort to post the picture. Kudos.

I wasn't lazy or unreasoned. I posted a picture and and asked a question, and the answer you gave me gave me all the information I was looking for. I think it was rather efficient, actually

That's all it takes, eh?

I won't bother asking for clarification next time.

To give me an idea of where you're coming from, yes. Are you upset that I didn't pick your brain to find out why you have this point of view?

It's a bit late, but I'm a Californian who didn't agree with Prop 8. To me, the point of having a constitution is to protect the rights of citizens by spelling out the limitations on the government's power. Screwing with a constitution to ban something you find icky is inappropriate in my opinion, whether it's gays, guns, racism or junk food.
-----Added 7/1/2009 at 02 : 28 : 49-----
If the government recognized the right of landlords to rent to whomever they wanted, these anti-discrimination laws wouldn't exist in the first place.

And I would also argue that discriminating against potential tenants may not be nice, but I'm not sure it qualifies as irresponsible.

That's not what is being argued here. Nobody is saying that a property owner should be able to use his or her property to imprison sex slaves, for example. It is being argued that property owners have a right to decide who gets to use their property.

FWIW, I'm not quite sure how I feel about gay marriage because I haven't thought the issue through all the way, though I'm inclined to think it's probably harmless. What I do think is that it's probably inevitable, so all this wailing and gnashing of teeth about it will probably seem anachronistic in ten or 15 years. So my view is "stop fighting it, it's here and spreading, and all you're doing by fighting it is making a nuisance of yourself."

However, it's always better to have social change happen organically rather than have it imposed by judicial fiat. This country was well on the way to liberal abortion laws before the issue became a festering sore as a result of Roe v Wade. The fundies rode that hobby horse for thirty years, maybe more. Had Roe just kicked the issue back to the states, we would have ended up as a practical matter with a setup similar though not identical to what we have now (available, with restrictions), but without the social "issue." With any luck we can avoid that sort of "hot button" with gay marriage.

It's a shame that we'll have to wait 10-15 years for this matter to be cleared up. Pretending gay marriage is an ethical gray area and getting bogged down in fighting over it prevents us from dealing more actively with real ethical and political dilemmas.
The California Supreme Court's decision to allow same-sex marriage wasn't political or ethical, it was simply based on the law and precedence. This discussion seems familiar.... :expressionless:

oy, Will, do you have a lot of law to learn..............

If we're lucky it will only take 10-15 years. Do you know why? Because people are assholes.

Instead of minding their own business, a bunch of assholes are trying to regulate relationships between consenting adults. Eventually same-sex marriage will legal nationwide. Then there will probably be a bunch of assholes suing churches who refuse to perform same-sex marriages.

:shakehead:

By the way; how did you get that politico thingy next to your avatar?

The government recognized the right of landlords to rent to whomever they wanted by default. It turned out that there were some landlords who couldn't quite handle the responsibility, and so that right was taken away.

It isn't so much the discriminating that's irresponsible, it's the discriminating based on race and/or religion and/or sexual preference and/or etc that's irresponsible. Landlords are business people, and business people have certain responsibilities to the communities in which they do business.

I wish I knew what was being argued here, but alas, FTA won't start a new thread to outline his position, so I'm forced to attempt to reconstruct it via the smattering of statements he has made. As you can see, it's not a very efficient way to argue.

Care to elaborate? :confused: