It was my fault; I didn’t write very clearly.
Yes, I applaud all several hundred of them, if not for believing in a god.
What I’m saying here is that even if some (or even MOST) people are using religion to justify their opposition to gay marriage, that this very different from those objections stemming from a particular religion. If you go to e.g. China, you’ll see people using Maoism (“interests of the state”) to oppose homosexuality. The religion itself is just a tool for demagogues to rile people up, and not opposed to homosexuality itself (any more than it opposes, say, shaving – Leviticus 19:27).
It’s simply an artifact of most Americans happening to be Christians.
Disagree with that last statement, considering how many cultural aspects of American society stem from Puritan roots. It’s all tied together, not a matter of “it just happens to be this way.”
We should keep in mind that his post name is “Pogo”.
I suspect there’s a reason for that…and he’s pretty much making the same arguments (if more loudly) than Pogo might have.
The tomato analogy is quite apt. The rest of us are out here enjoying tomatoes wondering what on earth is wrong with the tomato protestors.
Opposition to homosexuality (and not just gay marriage, but the act itself) is far from a uniquely American or Western phenomenon. There may even be a biological component to it. So it’s not something you can just write off to Puritans, because William Bradford never made it to China, Africa or the Middle East.
It happens to be the convenient excuse of choice for our culture, but if so, what about others?
Considering Prop 8’s defense, I’d say one of two things will happen:
- Federal court gives a big F-U to Prop 8, anyone can get a marriage license.
- Federal court gives a big F-U to families, government no longer recognizes marriages and everyone converts their licenses to domestic partnerships.
Either way, I’m happy. I think I’d be more happy if the government stops recognizing marriage though, even if only for the symbolism.
Glass houses Profane.
While procreation has been an implied part of the marriage contract, even in the days of Saint Augustine, marriage didn’t exist in order for procreation to occur. Augustine argued sexual morality over the course of several books, and while he wasn’t keen on sex (he’d been there, done that, got the t-shirt), he also argued that sex was part of prelapsarian Eden. It’s just that it was tainted as part of the Fall.
Some in his day argued that marriage was solely for procreation. Augustine pointed out (perhaps in On Julian?–my memory is a bit shaky here) that if marriage were solely for procreation, then old people would not be permitted to be married.
I think you misunderstood me. I meant it as a compliment. Pogo was awesome in his critique of politics and popular culture.
We’re talking through each other.
Trying to separate Prop 8 and Christian religions is disingenuous at best. The biggest contributors to Prop 8 were Christian religious organizations, the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church.
Oh no. I’m agreeing with Rimbo. What’s this world coming to?
… and i try to explain to evangelical friends that the Book of Revelation was basically rejected by Luther (the guy who founded the whole Protestant thing) they laugh it off and say “Yea, he was crazy!”, more or less. Or if i mention how many mainstream denominations (including if Wiki is right, the Catholic Church) have concluded Revelations to be an allegorical story reflecting the persecution of 1st C. Christians, they express astonishment at the strangeness or shrug their shoulders with a dismissive “that’s not what i was taught/believe”.
Using the Bible to disprove preconceived notions supported (in their view) by the Bible is… futile?
“faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”.
Not much empiricism in that statement. Or much rationality.
What’s frustrating is not that faith cannot be assailed by reason, but that certain kinds of faith need no sustenance nor origin. What would you call a faith in the teachings of the Bible that doesn’t need the Bible to validate it’s teachings? Superstition?
It is true that, because most Americans are Christians, if support for gay marriage were unrelated to religious beliefs, we would find that most Americans opposing gay marriage are Christians.
It is completely false that support for gay marriage is unrelated to religious beliefs. If we attempted to explain support for yummy tomatoes using religious belief, we would not find a relationship. We do find a large relationship between religious belief and support for gay marriage—a far higher proportion of Christians oppose gay marriage than non–Christians. If we compare a randomly selected Christian and a randomly selected non-Christian, the Christian is much less likely to support gay marriage.
The table below shows estimates of respondents to two General Social Surveys probability of agreeing or strongly agreeing that gays should have the legal right to marry, controlling for religious belief, attendence, education, and age.
[li] If support for gay marriage were like support for tomatoes, we would find that it the coefficients on religous belief and attendance were near zero and (very probably) statistically insignificant. The table shows that young, highly educated, NON-Christians, non-Republicans tend to support gay marriage. Even holding political affiliation, age, and education constant, the single strongest predictor of opposition to gay rights is being Christian, followed closely by frequency of attendence at religious services. All of these estimates are highly statistically significant (except that it doesn’t matter what type of non–Christian you are), for example, the probability we would observe an effect of Christianity this large by chance alone is about 3/1,000,000,000.[/li]
The claim that all opposition to gay marriage comes from Christians is too strong. The claim that opposition to gay marriage in the U.S. is highly concentrated among Christians is an empirical fact.
. dprobit support age educ2-educ5 christian atheist rel9jew attend republican, robust
Iteration 0: log pseudolikelihood = -2503.0059
Iteration 1: log pseudolikelihood = -2254.6712
Iteration 2: log pseudolikelihood = -2251.7667
Iteration 3: log pseudolikelihood = -2251.7641
Probit regression, reporting marginal effects Number of obs = 4281
Wald chi2(10) = 444.05
Prob > chi2 = 0.0000
Log pseudolikelihood = -2251.7641 Pseudo R2 = 0.1004
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Robust
support | dF/dx Std. Err. z P>|z| x-bar [ 95% C.I. ]
---------+--------------------------------------------------------------------
age | -.0019509 .0004212 -4.61 0.000 45.9348 -.002776 -.001125
high school | .0786682 .0209839 3.72 0.000 .511796 .03754 .119796
junior college | .2065187 .0368982 6.02 0.000 .071946 .1342 .278838
BA | .2079629 .0294632 7.51 0.000 .167951 .150216 .26571
graduate degree | .2697955 .0359414 7.99 0.000 .082691 .199352 .340239
christian | -.1310843 .0224959 -6.17 0.000 .814763 -.175175 -.086993
atheist | .0352536 .0421259 0.86 0.388 .029199 -.047312 .117819
jew | .1033259 .0586884 1.88 0.059 .018454 -.011701 .218353
attend | -.0303564 .0027788 -10.83 0.000 3.71035 -.035803 -.02491
republican | -.1068541 .0184778 -5.09 0.000 .13011 -.14307 -.070638
---------+--------------------------------------------------------------------
obs. P | .2714319
pred. P | .2501733 (at x-bar)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(*) dF/dx is for discrete change of dummy variable from 0 to 1
z and P>|z| correspond to the test of the underlying coefficient being 0
[*] Gearhead notes: marginal effects from probit regression with Huber-White covariance estimate. Omitted religion category is “other religion.” Omitted education category is high school dropouts.
Basic human decency? There’s nothing inherently religious or superstitious about believing things such as “Hey, don’t be a dick to other people” and “some things are inherently wrong and you should not do them” without ascribing any Biblical basis to those beliefs.
Just as someone can be opposed to gay marriage without any religious argument - it’s rare, but some people have based their opposition on nonreligious grounds varying from “Well, it’s antithetical to the natural order of things” to “It’s icky and I don’t want to have to acknowledge it!”
The inherent problem with the entire discussion/argument/process is that you have multiple layers of dialogue and questions about the validity of each part of the process: can the government legislate a moral issue? If so, is this considered a moral issue? If so, should the voice of the majority override the wishes of the minority? If so, … and on and on ad infinitum.
That’s not really what i’m talking about though w/re to my post above.
As far as g.m. goes, frankly it’s two issues - one about property rights, and one about civil rights. Even Idaho bunker conservatives should be jumping up and down in defense of a person’s right to decide to whom they give their inheritance or power of medical attorney.
I suppose you could say the strong feelings on the civil rights side is a natural extension of the attempt to define the boundaries of government’s proper involvement in organizing society. I don’t quite agree this is going on; although, perhaps, it should be. It has stimulated discussion about such things, though i’m not at all certain these kinds of higher level debates have trickled down into the mainstream discussion of the subject or will have any lasting impact.
Even Idaho bunker conservatives should be jumping up and down in defense of a person’s right to decide to whom they give their inheritance or power of medical attorney.
This is a bit of off-topic, but not really. The only thing Idaho bunker conservatives favor freedom-wise is the freedom to do things they approve of.
Most American religions now are experience-based, not textual. Oh sure, there’s a Bible they wave around, but from birth Christians in this country are not taught to approach religion as anything other than a football game. Arguing about Biblical textual interpretation gets you about as far as arguing about jersey colors.
[/li]
Neither you nor Pogo have addressed the objection I’ve raised: There is, believe it or not, a world outside of the USA.
You’re also confusing correlation and causation. Again, the whole tomato thing.
Ultimately, this is twisting statistics to support opposition to religion in the same way that religious people, maoists, etc use beliefs to support homophobia. Both points are wrong.