I just had an argument with a co-worker about gay rights.

(**-I find it most distressing of all that our government is trying to attach an Amendment to the Bill of RIGHTS whose sole intent is to TAKE AWAY CITIZENS' RIGHTS.)

*sighs*

With a porcupine!

http://www.nwf.org/ecards/images/porcupine.jpg

and then have her blow you. double sodomy fun! it's legal now! hot carls all 'round!

There's no point in arguing politics with coworkers.

What I wanna know is, what threat does allowing gay & lesbian couples to wed pose to these people? That's what I wanna know.
Cuz, I mean, aside from the whole Biblical interpretation, what's their big fucking beef?
To paraphrase my man Louis CK, it's not like there's anyone having gay sex on their lawn while they're trying to mow it. I mean, I couldn't understand being against that, but really, who the fuck cares what anyone else does behind closed doors if the first two letters of their last name aren't L and O.

Most Christians don't know fuck all about the Bible.

and after that, with a hedgehog!

http://magicmovie.8m.com/jeremy.jpg

bling bling!

Ah geez, this shit wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't people such as this what are so steeped in dogma that literally nothing (logic, truth, compassion, etc.) else can cut through who happen to be running our country and kinda taking over the world and shit.

Most Christians don't know fuck all about the Bible.

That's exactly what I'm saying. And even if they do, it's an understanding of a latter-era-translation-of-a-translation-of-a-translation which probably has little-to-nothing in common with how it was originally written.

What I wanna know is, what threat does allowing gay & lesbian couples to wed pose to these people? That's what I wanna know.

It comes down to an identity thing: "I am partially defined by Y; if you change the value of Y and what Y represents, you are changing a part of my identity." The "covenant marriage" in Louisiana is a similar thing -- when you get married, you can opt-in to a specific category of marriage that doesn't allow divorce except in specific cases (adultery and physical abuse, I think). Why? Because it "strengthens the concept of marriage," and hence the strength of self-identification for anyone who partially derives their identity from that concept.

A lot of things are motivated this way. At my last college -> "But if the school switches to open admissions, won't my degree mean less?" (The school was still accredited, had exit requirements, and this complaint was made even by people who already possessed their degree). In many religions -- a zillion times in the history of Christianity, several important times in Judaism -- you have major conflicts come up when Group X and Group Y both identify themselves as Z, and one or both think the other shouldn't be able to do so because it confuses the issue -- it dilutes their claim to a specific identity.

Keep it firm. Keep a touch cold if you have to. But say that. If she can't or won't give you an answer on that point, then that IS her answer.

And she tells you you're going to hell??? With friends like those...

I hope you remind her that she's going to Hell for her bigotry, so at least you'll have each other there (though if her God wins, you probably won't wanna hang out with her, cuz there'll be lots more fun people).

Also, that portion of the Old Testament includes a list of other restricted activities that most religious fundamentalists don't protest as wrong.

You might try quoting Shakespeare's "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." However, this will probably either go over your coworker's head.

Tell her boldly, simply and straightforwardly: "I am not asking you to change your own thoughts, but I am going to ask you to respect mine in turn, and my own interpretation of the Bible and this issue is radically different from yours. If you're not going to allow for the fact that we do differ and will only insist that your viewpoint is the one that will be respected -- and I am willing to hear yours in turn -- then I refuse to discuss this with you further and I would ask that you not talk to me about this again."

Ned, do you live inside a corporate training video?

I know, and it's good advice. It just sounded very corporate-training-ready, that's all.

I SMELL RICHARD SIMMONS PRANK CALL

um...you mean like any religious Jew?

Marvin Gaye to thread (his dad ran a church that obeyed kosher dietary laws)

Eh, *shrug* -- it's a work environment, but it's also straightforward enough to defuse conflict or at least set it beyond the bounds of something you'd want to deal with if you're going to be working with someone of a different viewpoint.

Yes. That said, they are talking about the law, and using the Bible to justify how the law should be in the U.S. is so obviously and painfully misguided and breaking the rules that it can be hard not to end up acting condescending. "So what that the Bible is opposed to homosexuality (in your view), what does that have to do with whether it should be legal or not?"

Exactly -- faithful Jews and some Christians are sensitive to all of Leviticus' prohibitions. But people like nickalicious' coworker seem to have absorbed anti-gay sentiments without thinking through their alleged scriptural basis.

In other words, people should be allowed to choose to have gay sex if they want to.

(This is from a legal perspective, again; obviously your code of what's moral and what's not can be as arbitrary as you want it to be.)

Unfortunately, rightist Christianity does have an answer to the pick-and-choose Leviticanism. But you're not likely to be having this argument with a theologian. If you are, I advise you simply crotch-punch them.

Well, right. That's the problem, though: There has been a conflation of a religious concept with a legal one. I wouldn't argue that Baptists preists should be required to sanctify gay marriages, but there is this whole legal side to marriage which gay people should have access to.

Geez, OTM amateurist -- I meant "few fundamentalist Christians" and ought to have been more specific. In addition, various religious vegetarians (Hindus et al) don't eat the little beasties, and I'm not sure whether they're halal for Muslims, either.

see the thing is i don't believe in heaven or hell so her saying that has little effect on me.

nickalicious, i don't think there is any way you can convince your co-worker she is wrong. i have hacked this old chestnut out with my aforementioned friend for years and years (also the abortion debate, yikes that one can get ugly), and theres just no moving her. ned's advice seems very sound.

I'm really curious to know this.

I'm really curious to know this.

It varies depending on how far right you go. Actually, I shouldn't describe it as rightist. Christianity of most stripes has an answer, but it comes down to how they treat the Old Testament in general, and Jesus's response to it. Right and left aren't the best designations, maybe. But along some kind of spectrum:

1 - Jesus IS the Law, Jesus replaces the Law, and the Old Testament is exactly that: an old testament, an old covenant, which is no longer binding. If Jesus didn't say it, or refer to it in the positive, it doesn't apply. This is actually a pretty reasonable interpretation; there was a lot of debate early on on whether the Old Testament was really a necessary part of a Christian Bible. But it's not the mainstream interpretation. It's often popular with fundamentalists who don't want to interpret the OT as still binding.

2 - "What comes out of your mouth can defile you. But what goes into your mouth, never." Through accidental narcissism I'm quoting from my own damn book there, not the Gospel reference, but only because I've read it more recently than the Bible. If you read the Gospels, one of the things you can notice is just how concerned they are with eating and with meal habits. One of the things that seems to have marked Jesus as different from contemporaries like John the Baptist is the fact that he ate, he drank, and he enjoyed doing both. He rejected, at least by implication, much of the ritual cleanliness requirements that were adhered to -- or at least respected by lip service -- by Jews both in the Diaspora and Jerusalem at the time. But when it comes to food, he seems to be very clear (to the extent he's ever clear): it isn't important. Eat what you like. Focus on what you put out into the world -- what comes out of your mouth -- rather than what you take into yourself from the world. This is pretty much the Catholic position, although I think a theologian would put it differently.

And I had other stuff in mind but got interrupted mid-post; got company tonight. Those are two possible explanations, though, certainly.

Oh, the "unfortunately" part -> Jesus doesn't seem to have said "what comes out of your ass may defile you, but what goes into your ass never will," so conservatives are able to construct arguments which lift the dietary restrictions but not the sexual ones. Usually the dietary restrictions are broadened to include cleanliness-based codes in general -- they'll agree that when Jesus is talking about food being okiedokie, he's dismissing the ritual cleanliness system entirely. The proscription against homosexuality and other forbidden sexual behavior, though, isn't simply a matter of cleanliness: it's ethics, or morals, or whatever you want to say, like "thou shalt not kill," only not as high-priority.

(What conservatives tend to miss is the complete lack in the Torah of a proscription against premarital sex for an unrelated heterosexual couple; Christianity's justification for that proscription is very shaky, and had I but gone to a Catholic school, I would have told many Catholic schoolgirls all about it.)

SimDogma would fucking rule for this reason, btw.

so jesus said that oral sex is OK?

(G*d, please don't throw that thunderbolt at me!)

Exactly. Here in Finland gay marriages are exactly these sort of civil unions: "married" gay couples have the same rights as other married couples, it just isn't officially called "marriage" - though it is in informal speech, obviously. Still, there are a couple of problems with this:

1) Those who are not members of the Lutheran Church or other religious institutions permitted wed people (like me) can still have "a civil marriage", which is a secular marriage verified at the administrative court. The gay marriage is exactly the same as the same civil marriage, but not to offend Christians it's called a "legalized partnership". But this raises the question, why can pagans get "married" and gay people don't. Pagans are sinners too, so doesn't the fact that they can get married undermine the institution of a Christian marriage as much as gay marriage does? Obviously, this is a question of legal semantics only; gay couples can and will call themselves married if they want to.

2) More importantly, there are a lot of Christian homosexuals who don't feel their sexual preference is in conflict with their Faith, and who would therefore like to have the blessing of the Church for their "marriage". Right now this a matter of big debate inside the Finnish Lutheran Church. Scandinavian Lutherans are known to be highly lenient, and if I remember correctly, having a Christian gay wedding is already possible in Denmark. I'm pretty sure this will happen in Finland too, since members of the new, more tolerant generation of theologians (most of whom are pro- gay marriage) are replacing the older generation inside Church administration.

There are laws for that too, right? If you, for example, change your sex, it's also changed in the official papers, so you can have a hetero marriage with someone of your previous sex (though I'm pretty sure the Church doesn't think it's that simple). But if your talking about transgendered or androgynous people, or transsexuals who haven't had or don't want to have the operation, or butch-and-femme couples - yeah, it's tricky.

Thanks Tep! So we've danced around the shellfish part of Leviticus but what about the mixed cloth? And if we're going to let the New Testament overrule the old, then why aren't we just going by Jesus' command to love and forgetting the rest?

The mixed cloth, etc., is all covered if you decide to interpret "goes into your mouth" as abandoning the ritual cleanliness system entirely -- but that still leaves the ethical requirements like honoring the sabbath, etc.

The handling of the NT vs the OT -- I think this is one of those things that we can chalk up to orthodoxy, in no small part. The Catholicism of the first few councils was totally a compromise Catholicism -- a collection of things which no group had really followed in that particular combination before, but which included the things the most groups required and excluded the things the most groups despised. That's how the canon was formed, with folks saying, "Listen, I know, you're not down with Revelation, but gimme an in here and I'll see what I can do for your boy's Epistles."

Just-woke-up-tangent. Anyway, point being: I think that different ideas about how to handle the Old Testament in a "New Testament world" resulted in an inconsistent handling of Old Testament material which was then justified by the Medieval theologians. (Aquinas spends a lot of time justifying the inherited sexual ethics through his take on natural law, and then everything gets compounded because he's essentially treated as scripture -- which means you get people compromising about how to handle him.)

"Clearly we must do better than almost equal...Gays and lesbians in Canada have long-term relationships. They belong to our families and in some cases raise children. They contribute to our communities and pay taxes. This governement believes they should also have access to marriage. Anything less is discrimination."

So there, USA.

Did someone say "Wyclefs"?

I'm not sure how much validity there is to that reading; I'm not sure you can necessarily argue that the story of S&G means the same thing every time it's name-checked in the OT. It's one possible argument, though. And it fits in pretty well with the general theme of the OT -- when a community is punished, it's nearly always for not worshipping properly, not for other sinful behavior.

There's also the ... obsolescence, so to speak, of the wrath of God. God does a lot of things in the OT -- and it might be relevant to point out that S&G were destroyed by God, not by men following his orders -- that he doesn't do again after that. In a Christian framework, wrath pretty much ends with the advent (so to speak) of Christ -- he didn't fight the battle of Jericho, he rendered unto Caesar.

xp Tad

I wanna Walk through Sodom with a boy on my arm
who's so damned pretty i dont know where i am
when they look so like a girl it's easy to swallow
so it's one notch on my arm toward a broader tomorrow

and if the future's looking grim
i can just take hold of him AND SAY

NOTHING OUT OF OUR LOINS SWEETIE
WILL EVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY!
NOTHING OUT OF OUR LOINS SWEETIE
WILL EVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY!

maybe you could use the same techniques used on arachnaphobes and stuff, like gradual exposure to what they're scared of until they feel ready to face it. you could start with some mild homoeroticism, maybe some prowrestling footage or "the truck driver and his mate" by the pet shop boys, eventually building up to an evening of light buggery.

AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO THE DAMNED!

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i'm sorry i just came upon this but i wish the co-worker in question would just get up and fucking die. thanks

It's been four years, maybe she did.

true

That's um... optimism?

Last night some woman was rude to me in the hotel where I work and as I was leaving, an ambulance came siren-ing in. All I could think was "maybe...?"

hahahahahahahaha

there's a little shakey in all of us

hahaha latebloomer with the zing

I don't get it.

"Watch out for those prickly snow balls!"