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Made to Care: The Illiberality of LGBT Politics
The subtitle to this piece could have been: We Told You So.
We marriage defenders said, “You can either have religious freedom/freedom of conscience or same-sex ‘marriage,’ but not both.” You may be asking, “Why is she bringing that up again? Does she want to restart the SSM wars?” It’s because the Culture Wars are back in the news, and not just in the US, but throughout “advanced” (beyond the truth) societies of the West.
Here at home, the Colorado baker is going to have his day at the Supreme Court. It only remains to be seen if Justice Anthony “Obergefell” Kennedy will decide in favor of the First Amendment or his own misguided redefinition of marriage. Even if he decides the baker gets to keep his freedom of conscience, he may do so on very narrow grounds that the baker has freedom of “creative expression” as an artist, and not so much freedom of association as implicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment.
And then there’s Rocklin Academy. Even kindergartners must be made to conform to the ascendant transgender confusion. Their teacher read I am Jazz and Red: A Crayon’s Story before the big reveal of their classmate as a trans-girl. Neither the teacher nor the administration thought it important to inform the students’ parents before teaching the kids that blue is red, or boys can be girls, if they feel like it. Notice a trend here?
LGBT politics isn’t about “marriage equality” or transgender rights. It is an attack on objective truth and an empowerment of authorities at all levels to coerce speech and thought. Marriage has always been a legitimization of male/female conjugal unions because it is in the interests of individuals and society to attach the naturally occurring offspring of such unions to their parents in family units. That was widely understood as the truth of marriage – the accepted social reality. Up until Obergefell (and, leading up to it, gay adoption), we, as individuals and as a society, were allowed to remain indifferent to naturally sterile relationships between homosexuals. No more. We are being forced to care.
It’s the same with the minuscule fraction of people with gender dysphoria. While their condition is tragic for these individuals and the people who love them, their impact on society was negligible until now. Now laws are being passed to compel speech in the form of “preferred pronouns” (ref: Jordan Peterson, Canada), and children are having their world turned upside down by the revision of what is so obviously true: a person with a penis (and XY chromosomes) is a boy, and a person without a penis (and XX chromosomes) is a girl. One might even say, “it’s science!”
These are just isolated anecdotes, you say? Ha! Let’s look at what happens when a nation caves to the LGBT agenda.
In Great Britain, the slide into unreality moves apace. The “Ministry of Equality” has expressed support for a proposal to allow gender reassignment surgery without any medical consultation as building on the “progress” of same-sex “marriage.” Also from an “equalities” minister: “I feel we’ll only have proper equal marriage when you can bloody well get married in a church if you want to do so, without having to fight the church for the equality that should be your right.” The leader of the Liberal Democrats was forced to resign despite voting for SSM, because his Christian belief that marriage is between a man and a woman is intolerable in politics and must be publicly denounced. Further, Christians are being excluded from foster parenting because, “The equality provisions concerning sexual orientation should take precedence.” You can’t make this shtuff up. So now homosexual couples will be able to foster and adopt, but people of religious conviction won’t. “Family” is now anything but a man and a woman loving their children in a faith-filled home.
We live in such stupid times.
Published in Culture
I am open to that. As physiological studies are notoriously hard to reproduce and that is just the good ones not alone the junk ones.
You’re locked in without listening to others even as you project that to the rest of us. I said where I think he was wrong and I also mentioned the areas where some corrective a were needed. Not getting SSI is hardly being locked out of tbe financial system.
Some conservatives have made the argument that letting the gays get married would give gays more reason to adopt bourgeois values.
But most of us were hung up on the myriad of issues that arise when a basic concept like “marriage” undergoes a radical redefinition. Unintended consequences abound.
Now Cato R. will respond that the problems that marriage faces in America did not start with SSM, and I agree. But SSM is not helping with any of the issues, and spins out several new issues.
The damage will accrue to our culture by further eroding families and bringing government even more into family life.
What did @catorand write?
” I never said I was “locked out” of the financial system. In fact I’ve had banking and investment accounts since before I met Mr. Rand. “Locked out” is your word. But I was deprived of a wide variety financial benefits and opportunities that heterosexual couples enjoyed. That is enough.”
Its like you didn’t even read….
The sad truth is that there is very little in the way of solid science that can be used to support or oppose social policy with respect to gays, gay parenting, gay “marriage,” or anything to do with gays.
The earliest scientific effort was Kinsey, who was a pervert whose science was awful but was titillating and his books became bestsellers. None of his work has lasting value because his flaws were so great. A female researcher did a study in the early 1960s that concluded that homosexuality did not seem to be a mental illness. She had a sample size of thirty and her method was ink-blot testing. A decade later, when the American Psychological Association voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, that was a political vote. There was no new research presented, nor was any science debated. What happened was a group of “queer activists” disrupted their convention and made such a ruckus that the fool psychologists voted to give them what they wanted.
Science over the decades since then has been awful, with methodological shortcomings of all sorts and bias on both sides, and small sample sizes and selection bias leading the flaws all the way.
So when the judge asks what does the science say, what never gets said, but which should be said by lawyers on both sides is: “Who knows? None of the science is credible.”
Well, not so fast.
From the Guardian:
And from this rather interesting paper:
I was quick to say that Cato Rand was thinking about “freedom for florists” years in advance, before Obergefell, and I need to be equally quick to say that MJ Bubba’s compassion is real. For anyone who wasn’t around for those SSM Wars, his social conservatism is iron-tough. He’s anti-SSM, that’s for sure, but it wouldn’t be fair to call him anti-gay. Even among his opponents, he’s nobody’s idea of a hater. (And yeah, we’ve seen a few over the years).
Props for admitting that one’s own side in a long dispute hasn’t always been in the right. Or, more accurately, that not everyone on your side has been completely in the right. Something we should all keep in mind.
Oh, and on Kinsey? Yep, you’re right, MJB: 10% was left at the wayside some time ago. 3%, maybe 4% is about as high as mainstream estimates go.
I am going to put forth a lot of those unintended consequences are actually not consequences but independent. A lot of what people here have complained about actually would likely happened regardless of SSM. These are cultural trends not dependent on one court ruling. Is it the SSM law that allows the couple to sue the baker or is an anti-discrimination law?
In Canada trans issue are coming to forefront not because we passed SSM 12 years ago, but because it made its way into popular culture in the USA.
Actually, not all heterosexual couples enjoyed the benefits you’re referring to. Only married straights had access. Why? Just cuz? I don’t think so, but we’ve spent thousands of posts exploring why and suffice to say you still think it’s because i hate gays and there’s no other possible reasin. As I say, we lost and it’s not going to do anyone good for either of us to run into the brick wall one more time.
On a practical point, paying taxes that others pay (including married straights) is not being deprived of financial benefits, nor is it as troublesome as punishing people for failing to act in a way we deem socially correct.
Gah, another 30+ comments? Just not that interested.
Exactly.
It’s not patently wrong. You can commingle assets then and now. People do it all the time. Joint bank accounts, joint ownership of property.
I don’t believe that marriage is for making anyone like anyone else; I don’t believe it’s the state’s role whatsoever – the idea is actually a bit repulsive to me. I do believe that the justification for civil marriage was extremely narrow to begin with. Losing means that not only is the justification not narrow now, whatever has replaced it is actively not something a limited government conservative would want. See Obergefell and references to promoting seldom worth or whatever flowery maleable language Kennedy used.
The thing is, the debate about SSM is not about whether Christians/Conservatives, as a whole or individually, are nice or not. It’s about justice for gay people
itnot about awards to other people for being nice.And MJ Bubba does not bug me, in fact I like him, but I think he’d be pretty up front about being anti-gay, and anti-homosexuality. Though he can speak for himself.
The article at the Guardian does not deliver what the headline promises. For the UK, the researcher reported that 8% of men and 16% of women have ever had a same-sex experience of any kind. So two kids masturbating together on one occasion counts. Baloney. The numbers of homosexuals is far, far smaller. 3% – 3.5% for men is what the best guesses are, and I think even these are somewhat inflated.
My aplogies. He said deprived of benefits.
Also, I apologize for my heated response about condescending sarcasm. I do think, though, that you are making assumptions about the traditionist arguments, especially on ricochet, which are incorrect. But as I said I have no desire to rehash them. I’m on record here since 2011 and I’m sure the archives can be searched if your interested.
Oh Zafar! I don’t miss them. I do appreciate Cato and Larry3435 staying with it into the hundreds of posts though long after most people ducked out. As acrimonious as it could get we were still talking and trying to understand each other at least.
I just wish I were more articulate and less passionate.
Same here, Ed. Let’s all catch our breath.
Thanks, Zafar. You don’t bug me, either. I just think you are on an unfortunate course.
I understand the “justice” claim in favor of SSM. I just think it is a really bad idea to re-define what the word “marriage” means. There is a lot about that redefinition that will provide lots of opportunities for our culture to come even more unglued than it already is.
I have had several acquaintances with gay persons over the years. I got along personally with all of them except one, who was a jerk, but his attitude sprang from issues that far exceeded his homosexuality and so I did not attribute it to that. So, not anti-gay so much as anti-gay-activist. The activists, or Big Gay, or what have you, enjoy the boost they get these days from the Left. (They should enjoy it now because the Left will turn on them as soon as they are no longer useful to the Left.) Leftists promote gays these days for the same reason they ever promoted gays; they use gay causes to leverage the courts to attack the churches.
Which is where my rub is.
The fact is, I think homosexuality sets you on a spiritual path that leads away from G-d. But that is not an adequate argument when the debate is over public policy, so I argue those matters on other grounds than religion.
Yes, that comparison would trivialize slavery, and I didn’t make it. Let’s recap:
Having to bake a cake – complete triviality
Being denied the right to marry – serious injustice
Slavery – crime against humanity
How’s that sound?
Zafar, that is an interesting paper. Notice they focus on “non-heterosexuality.” They focused on responses that indicated something less than “completely heterosexual,” so they were collecting responses from persons who thought they were somewhere out on the “Kinsey scale” of sexuality. This is not nearly the same thing as measuring homosexuality.
Also, they divided their study subjects into the anonymous survey and the super-duper-anonymity process survey. They found elevated responses of everything when they made a big impression on their subjects of how completely anonymous the survey was. Hence their conclusion:
All that is after they discuss the limitations of their sample, state it is not representative, and discuss how it should only be used to evaluate comparisons and not for absolute values:
No good, Cato. I completely reject your assessment.
I don’t think anybody who studies it think’s its 10% anymore. I also don’t think anyone thinks it’s 2-3%. So by throwing out the “wish fulfillment” number of 2-3%, lr kind of asked to have the equally unevidenced 10% thrown back at. I propose we all agree that we really don’t know but the best evidence is mid-single digits.
Yes, although the Court screwed it up doctrinally by creating the nonsense of “substantive due process” to incorporate them when there was a perfectly good privileges and immunities provision in the 14th amendment which did it directly and expressly. Another example of bad reasoning generating all sorts of unintended consequences down the road.
You keep calling it “having to bake a cake.” You keep ignoring that the punishments meted out by courts has been far more severe than forced baking of cakes.
I am left with the impression that you think it’s perfectly acceptable to destroy people’s businesses and lives because you want a cake. Losing your livelihood is not trivial. But it was never really about a cake, was it? It was about punishing people for thought-crimes.
We should all be very careful about the things we demand that the government sort out for us. Freedom of association is very important in giving gay people the right to freely associate with each other. Do you really want the federal government messing around with it? Are you certain it could never be used against you?
I think this started with your suggestion that I could commingle assets with Mr. Rand before we were legally married. And perhaps I’m just more familiar with tax law than you, but that is simply bullocks and the reason is that our marriage was not recognized for federal tax purposes. As a couple who is not legally married, any commingling constituted a taxable gift from one to the other (in excess of a threshold that was $12-14K/yr. in the relevant time period). Married couples are not subject to that tax. They can commingle to their heart’s content without gift tax.
So we’re not talking about a tax that married straights pay. We’re talking about a tax that married straights (and now married gays) do not pay, but that unmarried couples (straight or gay) always did and do. By refusing to recognize our marriage (a marriage that was legally entered into in Canada), I was forced to pay it (and try to report it honestly which is a whole other nightmare).
That tax exemption for married couples is in fact an example of a financial benefit I was deprived of until our marriage was legally recognized, and in our particular circumstances, it was not insignificant, as I was the breadwinner in our household for many years, even putting Mr. Rand through graduate school. I could not support us without making “gifts” to him that were taxable to me but which would not have been if we were legally married.
You’re not an accountant, are you?
No, I actually don’t think it’s ok to destroy people’s businesses over this. I understand there’s a principle at stake and frankly, I just don’t want a government that’s so intrusive it can tell you who to bake for. I still think it’s possible to see differences in magnitude where injustices are concerned. I think it’s an injustice that I have to take my shoes off to get on an airplane. I might even be able to make a Fourth Amendment argument against it. But I take my shoes off anyway because it’s not putting Jews in boxcars, it’s taking my shoes off. Both are bad. One is worse than the other.