Celebrating the Seven Cardinal Sins

 

One of my gay friends (“Chad”) posts repeated rainbow-colored memes and pictures on his Facebook feed, every day during “Pride Month.” He views gays as a civil rights group: Why should someone be treated differently simply because they were born differently? At first, I found it odd that Chad insisted on celebrating his pride in, well, in simply being born different. Nothing he accomplished, but just the way he was born. That seems like me spending a month every year celebrating my pride in being born with brown hair. I mean, brown hair is nice, but it seems like an inadequate reason for parades.

Anyway, after a while, it occurred to me that Chad’s celebration of pride could serve as a model for other holiday months. Perhaps we should have a celebratory month for each of the Seven Cardinal (Deadly) Sins: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, and Sloth. (Obviously, we would not celebrate The Seven Heavenly Virtues. That’s no fun.) Fortunately, the LGBTQQIP2SAA+ founding, um, fathers had the foresight to observe Pride Month in June, so each of the remaining six months of the year could be used to observe the six remaining Cardinal Sins. It works out so perfectly, I can’t believe that it’s a coincidence. This must have been the plan all along.

August will be fun – an entire month celebrating Lust! Woohoo! And I’m not sure exactly how some of our neighbors will observe the months celebrating Gluttony and Sloth. What, exactly, would they do differently? And, if I’m being brutally honest, I’m not sure what I would do differently in some of these months.

The Seven Cardinal Sins have always been commonplace in society. But they’ve moved beyond commonplace. Now they have become not just accepted but even admired in our society, to the point that we can have a month celebrating one of them and no one notices anything odd. You might think that somebody in their initial planning meetings might have said, “Hey, guys – er – people: You think maybe we should choose a different word? This is technically one of the Seven Cardinal Sins, ya know. This would be easy for some right-wing Christian hate-filled bigot to misinterpret and make a stink about it. How about, say, ‘confidence’ or something less potentially inflammatory?”

But we are a post-Christian society. Those in that meeting likely don’t know what the Cardinal Sins are, and it never occurred to them that Pride was one of them. Throughout history, religion has always been overlooked at times. Now it’s irrelevant. To many of us, anyway. So this concern probably never came up.

Imagine if I showed up to a Pride Parade, dressed in rainbow colors, carrying the following sign (with PRIDE in rainbow colors):

  • Proverbs 16:18PRIDE goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

I think most people wouldn’t even understand my point. Although I’m fairly certain that any quote from the Bible would be met with hostility, whether they understood it or not. They don’t have to understand something to hate it. In fact, it’s much easier to hate something you don’t understand.

This is why I fear our new culture, which intentionally does not teach children about Judeo-Christian ethics, and teaches that Western Civilization in general (and America in particular) is evil. This lack of understanding enables people to hate that which has done so much good in the world. The leftist desire for power requires them to destroy other sources of authority. They destroy them at their peril.

Actually, they destroy them at everyone else’s peril, as well.

The Judeo-Christian ethic teaches that we are all God’s children and that we all have value. We are important to God. And He expects a lot from us. We do our best to please him, although we frequently fail. But God loves us despite our shortcomings, so we continue to try.

The fact that we are all God’s children helped lead to the concept of personal liberties, property rights, and the rule of law – not just for royalty, but even for lowly peasants. If God loves each of us, then we all have some value, and thus, some rights. All of us. Personal liberty is a wonderful thing.

But with personal liberty, comes personal responsibility. Liberty does not mean ‘just do whatever you want.’ Only a virtuous people can handle liberty, without disastrous consequences. There are external authorities on virtue, like God, for example. But what if we don’t care for some of His outdated opinions on virtue? Surely we can just agree amongst ourselves what virtue is. That way we can change it to suit our tastes, as times change.

This has not turned out well. Why even try to follow rules, if we can change the rules whenever we want? Plus, it makes no sense, unless there is no God.

If there is no God, then some will conclude that their existence has no deeper meaning beyond amusing themselves. Hunter S. Thompson could explain this better than I, but without the guardrails provided by an overseeing God, you can go from liberty to chaos to misery very, very quickly.

Unbridled liberty should lead to happiness. It really should. Believe me, I wish it did.

But it doesn’t. For whatever reasons, it just doesn’t. It creates a hole in your soul that can never be filled. There are a lot of reasons for this. Many books have been written about this, including the book quoted above. But regardless of what those reasons are, this is just the way it is. Aristotle had a point with his discussions of logos. Man’s Search for Meaning sounds simple, but it can be complex.

Humans are funny creatures.

We’d rather not think about that, however. We’re having a wonderful time. So we march in parades and try to enjoy the moment, while trying not to think about where we’re all going.

And trying not to wonder why we have this nagging feeling, way deep inside, that something is just not quite right. We don’t want to search for meaning. We just want to have fun. So if we’re having so much fun, why are we so miserable? What’s wrong? What’s missing?

“It must be someone else’s fault. Those people over there. With their Bibles and their churches and crap. Man, I hate them, and everything they stand for. Whatever the heck that is. We must destroy them. Then, we’ll finally be happy.”

Leftist control of our educational and religious institutions has been an incredible success for them. Their fostering of ignorance, hate, and intolerance has put into motion things which will be difficult to undo.

I don’t see how this ends well. I don’t think that the left will see that they’ve won until we’ve all lost.


NOTE: Credit for the colorfully modified quote from Proverbs above, and for part of the inspiration for this post, goes to the indispensable Babylon Bee.

This was also partially inspired by stories told to me by my two kids in college. Their descriptions of their friends’ fun-filled misery added a lot to this as well. Many of their friends are having so much fun that they need Prozac and weekly counseling sessions.

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  1. Django Member
    Django
    @Django

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Rico threads that are about gay issues turn rapidly into The Sore Loser’s Club. Hey, SoCons, how’s that working out for you?

    Neither being homosexual nor having homosexual children I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I’m just watching from the sidelines.

    Along the lines of ‘if you don’t approve of gay marriage don’t have one’.

    I hate sound like a lawyer, but the process mattered more to me than the ultimate outcome. As I said above, the issue should have been resolved in the legislatures. 

    • #121
  2. Cato Rand Inactive
    Cato Rand
    @CatoRand

    Django (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Rico threads that are about gay issues turn rapidly into The Sore Loser’s Club. Hey, SoCons, how’s that working out for you?

    Neither being homosexual nor having homosexual children I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I’m just watching from the sidelines.

    Along the lines of ‘if you don’t approve of gay marriage don’t have one’.

    I hate sound like a lawyer, but the process mattered more to me than the ultimate outcome. As I said above, the issue should have been resolved in the legislatures.

    The outcome mattered to me a lot, but I agree that it should have been resolved in the legislatures, or at least under the Equal Protection clause rather than the “Sweet Mystery of Life” clause.  Maybe state by state with Full Faith and Credit being enforced.  There were lots of more legitimate ways to get to the same, or nearly the same, outcome.  I do think the status quo ante was an intolerable infringement on the rights of gay people though.

    • #122
  3. Django Member
    Django
    @Django

    Cato Rand (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Rico threads that are about gay issues turn rapidly into The Sore Loser’s Club. Hey, SoCons, how’s that working out for you?

    Neither being homosexual nor having homosexual children I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I’m just watching from the sidelines.

    Along the lines of ‘if you don’t approve of gay marriage don’t have one’.

    I hate sound like a lawyer, but the process mattered more to me than the ultimate outcome. As I said above, the issue should have been resolved in the legislatures.

    The outcome mattered to me a lot, but I agree that it should have been resolved in the legislatures, or at least under the Equal Protection clause rather than the “Sweet Mystery of Life” clause. Maybe state by state with Full Faith and Credit being enforced. There were lots of more legitimate ways to get to the same, or nearly the same, outcome. I do think the status quo ante was an intolerable infringement on the rights of gay people though.

    With no hostility at all, I disagree on this point. I never thought it was about rights, but rather about the definition of marriage. If marriage is defined, vaguely, as a monogamous union of a man and a woman for the purpose of [fill in the blank], then two men and two women can’t be married. In any case, the issue is decided and I don’t lose sleep about it. You are happy with the results and good for you.

    Maybe the government(s) should have gotten out of the marriage mess entirely and let adults get on with their lives? 

    • #123
  4. GrannyDude Member
    GrannyDude
    @GrannyDude

    Zafar (View Comment):

    GrannyDude (View Comment):

    So is the depressingly solipsistic (and so unsexy!) new fad of demanding that one’s sexual eccentricities be recognized by others as an “identity.”

    Isn’t it ironic that if homosexuality etc had not been such a persistently big deal for conservative societies (in that they set homosexuals apart and excluded them [at best]) there would have been no Gay movement and no Gay identity?

    In a weird way we exist as a people because of Conservative attitudes.

    It is!  

    Sex is not culturally-constructed, but “identity” is, and I should think it is often externally imposed.  

    I refuse to say —after the fashion of my denomination—that I “identify” as a woman. I don’t. I just am one. I identify as a minister, as a chaplain, as a writer and I in certain situations I might even  identify as a mother (E.g. “Because I’m your mother, that’s why!”). To use that language reinforces (as it is intended to)  the notion that a transgender person can similarly identify as a woman even if he is biologically male, and his identification and my identification are the same thing and have the same result. 

    But I was not prevented from trying out for little league when I was little because I identified as a girl, but because I was one. A sexual predator did not select me for abuse based on what I thought I was, but because of  what I actually was—female. And of course, I didn’t get pregnant, give birth and nurse my children because I identify as a woman but because my anatomy and physiology are those of a woman and designed specifically for these functions and not merely to provide decor for my idea of myself. 

    Having said what should be obvious, I now find myself being named, from the outside, by the transgendered and their “allies”  as a “cis-gender female.” An interesting question: presumably, when a handful of white would-be colonialists showed up in Africa, black people who had never before thought it necessary to “identify” as black found themselves so-identified.  

    Not a big fan of that setting-apart thing, myself.  

    • #124
  5. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    Django (View Comment):
    Maybe the government(s) should have gotten out of the marriage mess entirely and let adults get on with their lives? 

    The problem is, when some adult couples get on with their lives, babies are born. The government is instituted with the consent of the governed to protect their natural rights, too. And it’s doing a helluva a bad job of it. 

    • #125
  6. GrannyDude Member
    GrannyDude
    @GrannyDude

    Cato Rand (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Rico threads that are about gay issues turn rapidly into The Sore Loser’s Club. Hey, SoCons, how’s that working out for you?

    Neither being homosexual nor having homosexual children I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I’m just watching from the sidelines.

    Along the lines of ‘if you don’t approve of gay marriage don’t have one’.

    I hate sound like a lawyer, but the process mattered more to me than the ultimate outcome. As I said above, the issue should have been resolved in the legislatures.

    The outcome mattered to me a lot, but I agree that it should have been resolved in the legislatures, or at least under the Equal Protection clause rather than the “Sweet Mystery of Life” clause. Maybe state by state with Full Faith and Credit being enforced. There were lots of more legitimate ways to get to the same, or nearly the same, outcome. I do think the status quo ante was an intolerable infringement on the rights of gay people though.

    I agree, with both premises. Same sex marriage was a good thing, but it was really too bad that SCOTUS stopped the discussion. While I know that would’ve taken longer, and gays and lesbians would have to wait yet longer, I think the process of legislating might have served to stimulate necessary and long-overdue discussions about what marriage was and is and should/could be, what role the government should have in it (if any) and, while we’re on the subject,  what else we might want to do to strengthen the institution of marriage now that so many appear to be interested in entering into it and/or defending it. That opportunity got (mostly) squandered, I think. 

    • #126
  7. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    Zafar (View Comment):

    No mention of reducing the occurrence of sodomy.

    Which doesn’t seem to be realistically achievable. (Whether it’s desirable or not.)

    Not clicking links and had to read your comment between the fingers covering my face. If you’re telling me the practice of sodomy is on the rise even among heterosexuals, I despair for our civilization.  

    There’s a reason all the assistance is needed for anal sex to occur without doing damage — the rectum wasn’t made for it. It is contrary to Nature. 

    We’re obviously never going to agree that what gays do consensually is harmful to you/them (physically, psychologically, and spiritually). But, I hope we can agree that society is not benefited by more people taking up the practice of anal sex. 

    • #127
  8. Unsk Member
    Unsk
    @Unsk

    As to the idea of same-sex marriage: Marriage is a religious institution.  As such under the first Amendment , the government has no business and no right to tell religious institutions who they should marry and who they should not.

    Somewhere along the way  many generations  ago, the government wrongly got involved in regulating marriages, which does not make their regulations now lawful or Constitutional.  There are many a practice that the Supreme Court has ruled Constitutional which are not; one only needs to look at questionable legal antics of Chief John Roberts to see that.  BTW, the Constitution did not grant to the Supreme Court the power to “interpret” the Constitution; that power was grabbed in the Marbury vs Madison decision, but even then back in the early nineteenth century words and meaning meant something. Today words and meaning are as elastic as whatever the Left wants to make them. 

    If the government wants to regulate the union of two people  in something that resembles a “marriage”, then it should grant licenses for Civil Unions, not Marriages,  as to not infringe on peoples’ religious rights and in that way there would be no need to discriminate against same-sex unions or heterosexual unions.

    • #128
  9. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    I wouldn’t go along with downgrading my own marriage to “civil union” and I bet few other couples would go for it either, especially if the reason given was “We have to do this to the 97% because otherwise the 3% will think they can be married”. 

     

    • #129
  10. GrannyDude Member
    GrannyDude
    @GrannyDude

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I wouldn’t go along with downgrading my own marriage to “civil union” and I bet few other couples would go for it either, especially if the reason given was “We have to do this to the 97% because otherwise the 3% will think they can be married”.

     

    It’s an interesting question, though. I perform weddings as a minister, and it always seems odd to me that, for the duration of the wedding, I serve as an agent of the state. Why then? I can’t divorce people; why can I marry them? 

    For most of human history the government had nothing to do with marriage. We are so accustomed to thinking of the government as the locus of all—not just some—power that it seems odd to think that a non-governmental (meaning no cops in the background?) entity like a church could declare someone married, and everyone in the community would understand what that means and enforce its boundaries. 

    I think I’d be okay with shifting over to “you go to the government to get your civil paperwork done and then you get married by the human beings to whom you are genuinely accountable, namely your family, friends and neighbors.” 

    In real life, how often are you shown a marriage certificate when a woman introduces her husband to you? If you see him canoodling in a corner with another woman, is it the offense against the government that shocks you, or the insult to both the woman and to the social fabric? 

    All sorts of young people assure me that they live together because they “don’t need a piece of paper” and/or they are aren’t ready for the piece of paper….okay, whatever. But when the breakup comes, it still hurts a whole lot. And if there is property, family, children involved, for all practical purposes it’s a divorce with all the misery that implies, and whether a church or a government involves itself (it will, if there is property and children) or not. 

     

     

    • #130
  11. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    No mention of reducing the occurrence of sodomy.

    Which doesn’t seem to be realistically achievable. (Whether it’s desirable or not.)

    Not clicking links and had to read your comment between the fingers covering my face.

    They were only to places like NPR or the Centre for Disease Control.  Really.

    We’re obviously never going to agree that what gays do consensually is harmful to you/them (physically, psychologically, and spiritually). But, I hope we can agree that society is not benefited by more people taking up the practice of anal sex.

    I don’t think society is asking either of us for our opinion – society is just doing, the way it tends to.

    But facts are always better than prejudged assumptions – whatever one is thinking about.

    • #131
  12. Phil Turmel Inactive
    Phil Turmel
    @PhilTurmel

    GrannyDude (View Comment):
    For most of human history the government had nothing to do with marriage. We are so accustomed to thinking of the government as the locus of all—not just some—power that it seems odd to think that a non-governmental (meaning no cops in the background?) entity like a church could declare someone married, and everyone in the community would understand what that means and enforce its boundaries. 

    This is just flat-out wrong, @GrannyDude.  Throughout most of human history, there’s been no formal division between government and religion.  They’ve been intimately tied together.  And government has always been interested in children, both in the generic “have a next generation to pass the torch to”, and in the very specific “who inherits what?”  Marriage isn’t just the vehicle that passes culture (including our culture of respect for personal freedoms) to the next generation, but is the vehicle for social capital’s movement through the centuries.  Whether it was a patent of nobility, a hereditary position in government, a binding of a serf to the land, or some form of modern financial inheritance, reliably identifying who begat whom, and their legitimacy, was a very big deal, indeed.  Religions acted as an arm of the government, and vice versa, through all of human history.  There hasn’t been a culture in written human history that didn’t care about marriage, and didn’t have government enforce it in one form or another.

    Government has an interest in traditional marriage as the incubator of each generation, and the conveyor of family property thereto.  It has no interest whatsoever in marital love, the emotion.  Government promotion of traditional marriage is like government promotion of vaccination, writ large.  In both cases, failure to achieve sustainable percentages of participation dooms the population to eventual catastrophe.

    • #132
  13. Phil Turmel Inactive
    Phil Turmel
    @PhilTurmel

    The French Revolution treated the Catholic Church especially harshly because it functioned as the repository of official, government enforced, inheritance records.  Burning the churches destroyed the records of estate ownership and other property ownership, guaranteeing that even if the revolution failed, any surviving nobles would have difficultly reconstructing the status quo ante.

    • #133
  14. Cato Rand Inactive
    Cato Rand
    @CatoRand

    Django (View Comment):

    Cato Rand (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Rico threads that are about gay issues turn rapidly into The Sore Loser’s Club. Hey, SoCons, how’s that working out for you?

    Neither being homosexual nor having homosexual children I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I’m just watching from the sidelines.

    Along the lines of ‘if you don’t approve of gay marriage don’t have one’.

    I hate sound like a lawyer, but the process mattered more to me than the ultimate outcome. As I said above, the issue should have been resolved in the legislatures.

    The outcome mattered to me a lot, but I agree that it should have been resolved in the legislatures, or at least under the Equal Protection clause rather than the “Sweet Mystery of Life” clause. Maybe state by state with Full Faith and Credit being enforced. There were lots of more legitimate ways to get to the same, or nearly the same, outcome. I do think the status quo ante was an intolerable infringement on the rights of gay people though.

    With no hostility at all, I disagree on this point. I never thought it was about rights, but rather about the definition of marriage. If marriage is defined, vaguely, as a monogamous union of a man and a woman for the purpose of [fill in the blank], then two men and two women can’t be married. In any case, the issue is decided and I don’t lose sleep about it. You are happy with the results and good for you.

    Maybe the government(s) should have gotten out of the marriage mess entirely and let adults get on with their lives?

    I am a libertarian so you’ll get no argument from me there.  I still think there would be marriages.  The institution seems deeply rooted in human nature and precedes the state.  But it would take the state out of the business of discriminating among people and marriages, which discrimination is inherently problematic in a pluralistic society.

    • #134
  15. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Phil Turmel (View Comment):

    The French Revolution treated the Catholic Church especially harshly because it functioned as the repository of official, government enforced, inheritance records. Burning the churches destroyed the records of estate ownership and other property ownership, guaranteeing that even if the revolution failed, any surviving nobles would have difficultly reconstructing the status quo ante.

    Interesting. I didn’t know that.

    • #135
  16. Cato Rand Inactive
    Cato Rand
    @CatoRand

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):
    Maybe the government(s) should have gotten out of the marriage mess entirely and let adults get on with their lives?

    The problem is, when some adult couples get on with their lives, babies are born. The government is instituted with the consent of the governed to protect their natural rights, too. And it’s doing a helluva a bad job of it.

    In what sense?

    • #136
  17. Cato Rand Inactive
    Cato Rand
    @CatoRand

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    No mention of reducing the occurrence of sodomy.

    Which doesn’t seem to be realistically achievable. (Whether it’s desirable or not.)

    Not clicking links and had to read your comment between the fingers covering my face. If you’re telling me the practice of sodomy is on the rise even among heterosexuals, I despair for our civilization.

    There’s a reason all the assistance is needed for anal sex to occur without doing damage — the rectum wasn’t made for it. It is contrary to Nature.

    We’re obviously never going to agree that what gays do consensually is harmful to you/them (physically, psychologically, and spiritually). But, I hope we can agree that society is not benefited by more people taking up the practice of anal sex.

    Not benefiting perhaps.  But not likely harmed either.

    • #137
  18. Cato Rand Inactive
    Cato Rand
    @CatoRand

    Unsk (View Comment):

    As to the idea of same-sex marriage: Marriage is a religious institution. As such under the first Amendment , the government has no business and no right to tell religious institutions who they should marry and who they should not.

    Somewhere along the way many generations ago, the government wrongly got involved in regulating marriages, which does not make their regulations now lawful or Constitutional. There are many a practice that the Supreme Court has ruled Constitutional which are not; one only needs to look at questionable legal antics of Chief John Roberts to see that. BTW, the Constitution did not grant to the Supreme Court the power to “interpret” the Constitution; that power was grabbed in the Marbury vs Madison decision, but even then back in the early nineteenth century words and meaning meant something. Today words and meaning are as elastic as whatever the Left wants to make them.

    If the government wants to regulate the union of two people in something that resembles a “marriage”, then it should grant licenses for Civil Unions, not Marriages, as to not infringe on peoples’ religious rights and in that way there would be no need to discriminate against same-sex unions or heterosexual unions.

    This comment reflects an ignorance of the law on multiple counts.  First and most importantly, in the United States no court has ever required a religious institution to perform a marriage it objected to.  Very likely none ever will.  Second, judicial review is implicit in the structure of the Constitution and if you look at the records of the constitutional convention you will find that that was understood by the framers.   Last, marriage, while a religious institution, is not only a religious institution.  It is also a legal institution.  If you want to argue that it shouldn’t be, I’d probably agree with you, at least in principle.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t one.  So long as that is the case, there might be – and in fact probably must be – differences between how any particular religion defines the institution and how the state does.

    • #138
  19. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Cato Rand (View Comment):

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    No mention of reducing the occurrence of sodomy.

    Which doesn’t seem to be realistically achievable. (Whether it’s desirable or not.)

    Not clicking links and had to read your comment between the fingers covering my face. If you’re telling me the practice of sodomy is on the rise even among heterosexuals, I despair for our civilization.

    There’s a reason all the assistance is needed for anal sex to occur without doing damage — the rectum wasn’t made for it. It is contrary to Nature.

    We’re obviously never going to agree that what gays do consensually is harmful to you/them (physically, psychologically, and spiritually). But, I hope we can agree that society is not benefited by more people taking up the practice of anal sex.

    Not benefiting perhaps. But not likely harmed either.

    There has to be some benefit to someone, otherwise nobody would bother.  

    • #139
  20. Django Member
    Django
    @Django

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Cato Rand (View Comment):

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    No mention of reducing the occurrence of sodomy.

    Which doesn’t seem to be realistically achievable. (Whether it’s desirable or not.)

    Not clicking links and had to read your comment between the fingers covering my face. If you’re telling me the practice of sodomy is on the rise even among heterosexuals, I despair for our civilization.

    There’s a reason all the assistance is needed for anal sex to occur without doing damage — the rectum wasn’t made for it. It is contrary to Nature.

    We’re obviously never going to agree that what gays do consensually is harmful to you/them (physically, psychologically, and spiritually). But, I hope we can agree that society is not benefited by more people taking up the practice of anal sex.

    Not benefiting perhaps. But not likely harmed either.

    There has to be some benefit to someone,  nobody would bother.

    I’ll catch Hell for this, but I can’t resist, so sue me. Remember Andy Rooney, the pretend curmudgeon on 60 Minutes a long while ago? He made the mistake of uttering the words, “I find the homosexual act repugnant.” He was forced to apologize, and he had not stated which specific act he found repugnant. For heteros, the end is always tab A in slot B, no matter how many detours are taken along the way, but Dan Savage once said that doesn’t apply his world. I’ll take his word for it.

    • #140
  21. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Cato Rand (View Comment):

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    No mention of reducing the occurrence of sodomy.

    Which doesn’t seem to be realistically achievable. (Whether it’s desirable or not.)

    Not clicking links and had to read your comment between the fingers covering my face. If you’re telling me the practice of sodomy is on the rise even among heterosexuals, I despair for our civilization.

    There’s a reason all the assistance is needed for anal sex to occur without doing damage — the rectum wasn’t made for it. It is contrary to Nature.

    We’re obviously never going to agree that what gays do consensually is harmful to you/them (physically, psychologically, and spiritually). But, I hope we can agree that society is not benefited by more people taking up the practice of anal sex.

    Not benefiting perhaps. But not likely harmed either.

    There has to be some benefit to someone, otherwise nobody would bother.

    That doesn’t sound like the people on the planet where I’m living now. 

    • #141
  22. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    I suspect church and state have often intervened in marriages since long before recorded history. 

    • #142
  23. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    TBA (View Comment):

    I suspect church and state have often intervened in marriages since long before recorded history.

     Church and state are both relatively new institutions, aren’t they? 

    • #143
  24. Cato Rand Inactive
    Cato Rand
    @CatoRand

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Cato Rand (View Comment):

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    No mention of reducing the occurrence of sodomy.

    Which doesn’t seem to be realistically achievable. (Whether it’s desirable or not.)

    Not clicking links and had to read your comment between the fingers covering my face. If you’re telling me the practice of sodomy is on the rise even among heterosexuals, I despair for our civilization.

    There’s a reason all the assistance is needed for anal sex to occur without doing damage — the rectum wasn’t made for it. It is contrary to Nature.

    We’re obviously never going to agree that what gays do consensually is harmful to you/them (physically, psychologically, and spiritually). But, I hope we can agree that society is not benefited by more people taking up the practice of anal sex.

    Not benefiting perhaps. But not likely harmed either.

    There has to be some benefit to someone, otherwise nobody would bother.

    Fair point.  But WC was talking about a benefit “to society.”

    • #144
  25. Unsk Member
    Unsk
    @Unsk

    “First and most importantly, in the United States no court has ever required a religious institution to perform a marriage it objected to. Very likely none ever will.”

    Not yet.  But perhaps you are not familiar with my State of California, where there have been many an instance where “Very likely none ever will” happen with regularity.  That section of the law is clearly in flux, and imposing a Same Sex Marriage Inalienable Right clearly was the direction where many wanted the Court to head but  hopefully  the Court with Trump’s new appointees will not go down that road. 

    • #145
  26. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    The Reticulator (View Comment):

    TBA (View Comment):

    I suspect church and state have often intervened in marriages since long before recorded history.

    Church and state are both relatively new institutions, aren’t they?

    Shaman and Chieftain then. 

    • #146
  27. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Django (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Django (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Rico threads that are about gay issues turn rapidly into The Sore Loser’s Club. Hey, SoCons, how’s that working out for you?

    Neither being homosexual nor having homosexual children I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I’m just watching from the sidelines.

    Along the lines of ‘if you don’t approve of gay marriage don’t have one’.

    I hate sound like a lawyer, but the process mattered more to me than the ultimate outcome. As I said above, the issue should have been resolved in the legislatures.

    Yeah, it’s the process for me as well. SCOTUS should make rulings from the Constitution, not popular opinion – because opinions shift over time. Moreover, ‘people who have gay sex should be executed’ is a popular opinion (just not here). 

    • #147
  28. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Cato Rand (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    There has to be some benefit to someone, otherwise nobody would bother.

    Fair point. But WC was talking about a benefit “to society.”

    People doing what they want to do is a benefit to society.

    That’s what liberty and the pursuit of happiness look like.

    Obviously there are some constraints (consenting adults, for example) but the fewer the better, or is this whole liberty and the pursuit of happiness no longer a thing?

    • #148
  29. Cato Rand Inactive
    Cato Rand
    @CatoRand

    Zafar (View Comment):

    Cato Rand (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    There has to be some benefit to someone, otherwise nobody would bother.

    Fair point. But WC was talking about a benefit “to society.”

    People doing what they want to do is a benefit to society.

    That’s what liberty and the pursuit of happiness look like.

    Obviously there are some constraints (consenting adults, for example) but the fewer the better, or is this whole liberty and the pursuit of happiness no longer a thing?

    No point in arguing about this Zafar.  Sure, (some) people enjoy anal sex and that’s good.  But somewhere on the other side of a gray area me having anal sex isn’t a “social” benefit in quite the same way that, say, curing cancer would be.  Both might be beneficial, but one, at least as a matter of degree is more “social” a benefit.

    • #149
  30. GrannyDude Member
    GrannyDude
    @GrannyDude

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    Zafar (View Comment):

    No mention of reducing the occurrence of sodomy.

    Which doesn’t seem to be realistically achievable. (Whether it’s desirable or not.)

    Not clicking links and had to read your comment between the fingers covering my face. If you’re telling me the practice of sodomy is on the rise even among heterosexuals, I despair for our civilization.

    There’s a reason all the assistance is needed for anal sex to occur without doing damage — the rectum wasn’t made for it. It is contrary to Nature.

    We’re obviously never going to agree that what gays do consensually is harmful to you/them (physically, psychologically, and spiritually). But, I hope we can agree that society is not benefited by more people taking up the practice of anal sex.

    Gay women are okay, though, right? Not a whole lot of anal sex going on there, at least as far as I know. (Having watched “Orange is the New Black”— between the fingers covering my face— I realize there is a lot I don’t know!)

     

    • #150
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