Draco wrote:Of course you probably donate money to your church, thereby providing material support to the enemy.
I don't, actually. Which means I don't get to go to the temple and wear special undies. I also don't want my son to be baptized into the church when he's eight. I want him to choose if that's his thing when he's older (religious outings for churches of all kinds are de rigueur in my household, just like cultural activities and educational activities). And if he chooses no church, that's fine, too.
My personal beliefs include a Christian god, but are not limited to it, so I attend church for selfish reasons - I enjoy it. I find church relaxing and welcoming. I enjoy my friends there. My son gets a chance to deal with floods of people for a short period of time and then it's over. And most of the people there are people that I would prefer he be with (over many of the people in my neighborhood). There are a lot of children his age, too.
But I have issues with the Mormon church. I don't blindly accept all of their doctrine, and I certainly don't accept the same political views of the majority of attendees. As a very inactive member for over fifteen years, with a husband who hasn't been a member for most of his life, I don't have the same fear of the outside world that the sheltered members of the church here have. I also am a different kind of mom than the mothers there, and I can only handle small doses of Mormon momness before I have to excuse myself (To be fair, though, this is not really Mormon-specific; I was just raised weird). And I hate Jello.
Draco wrote:PS: Whats up with the seniors part of the law?
Many senior citizens have benefits that would be denied them if they remarried, so they choose to live in a domestic partnership. But they don't have rights like the ability to be with their partners in the case of illness, or the ability to claim their partner's body for funeral purposes - and this is the group of people who really need to have those rights. Affirming this law would allow them to have the rights of married couples without losing their benefits and such.
Kaelik wrote:For Maj to pretend that what happened was Mormon Joe heard that being gay is a mental disorder, and then started hating gays is fucking retarded ass backwards lying to excuse people.
I have no idea how you got that from what I said. It literally sounds like you hate me and are making things up.
Kaelik wrote:And pretending that all the asshole fuckers who voted X on prop 8 even knew that being gay had ever been classified as a mental disorder is just Maj trying to excuse her religion full of asshole bigots who hate gays because they are bigots in a bigoted church, rather than because they really believe that the APA was super smart in 1972 but got stupid since then.
Since my post didn't mention Mormons, or Proposition 8, or excusing the horridly bigotted behavior of the Mormons in California in the voting on that Proposition, I'm a little confused. And in the effort to clear up that confusion, I'm going to quote what I said:
Maj wrote:And while I believe that the rights of gays are technically covered by that amendment, in practice, they are not recognized. I don't know if that's because of the heritage that homosexuality has as a mental disorder (and thus not a "natural" state of being), if it's fear - most failures of civility are because someone's hysterical about a different group of people for whatever reason, be they women, black, teenagers, whatever - or if it's something else.
There is a legacy in this country against gays, much like there is a legacy in this country of hating black people. I don't know if the source of the anti-gay attitude stems from the idea that many eligible voters were raised with the notion that being gay was a mental problem (and thus treatable/cured), or from fear (you can simplify this to hate because that's the net effect), or from something else (maybe even a combination of the two).
I seriously hear shit like "Kosher is a kind of Jew," "no one lived in Israel before it was a country," and "Obama must be Muslim because his name sounds like Osama" from my step-mother. She really is that retarded. Just like we've commonly acknowledged in other threads all over these boards, people who grow up with a given set of ideas frequently don't ever stop to question them and live their whole lives without giving the notion of "black people are poor and on welfare" or "marrying an Italian Catholic will send my son to hell" or "marijuana is a gateway drug" or "being gay is a disease" a second thought.
And these people are still alive and still eligible to vote (ie: they were born and raised before 1972). It's not necessarily out of malice that they vote - it's out of ignorance. Why give gays special rights to marry? We don't give it to depressed people. Or manic-depressives. Or schizophrenics.
The idea that gay people are not unnatural has yet to sink in - and probably won't. And while I won't go so far as to wish that they all drop dead soon so that mentality will go away, I do have hope that the younger generations of voters never recognize that kind of thinking as legit.
So because not everyone wants to marry as a gay couple, it doesn't have enough interest?
