Animator Mark Fiore comments on the Attack of the Gay Agenda.
Bill (and Kent) tally the mayors that have said they support marriages for gay couples. So does Tom Balkin, who cites a Washington Post article and discusses how activism shapes public opinion, which in turn reshapes constitutional norms.
Greg Valiga cites coverage of DearMary.com by Newsweek.
John Kusch writes:
I’ve been spending a lot of time arguing the gay marriage issue on moderate-to-conservative websites, trying to figure out what is so threatening about the legal recognition of same-sex relationships.
He passes on some of what he has learned in a calm and thoughtful essay.
The somewhat conservative Family Scholars Blog consistently manages to discuss issues with precision and without polemics.
Exodus spokesman Randy Thomas begins his Feb. 19 blog entry with rational if somewhat erroneous guesswork over the legal issues in San Francisco and Massachusetts. He should have researched the legal issues a bit before posting. Instead, he proceeds to associate San Francisco and Massachusetts officials and the “gay lobby” with the Nazis, citing an essay on “Homosexuality and the Nazi Party” by fringe antigay propagandist Scott Lively:
In both states a small group of people assumed power to determine the will of and effectively skip over the voice of the people. This isn’t just about being worried over the morality of same sex attraction. We should be worried about those who would be tyrants and exploiting this issue, like the Nazi’s did, for their own agendas to grab power. If the gay lobby succeeded in their efforts according to the true rules of government, I still would be opposed and offering a different viewpoint through the process and beyond it. But at least there wouldn’t be a concern about the basic structure of the society’s democratic foundation regarding balances of power and freedom. San Francisco is a much bigger concern than Massachusetts in my estimation: the “do anything” methods being employed to achieve an end could set the stage for fascism in the name of freedom and “rights.”
All you need is a leader who doesn’t give a hoot to existing laws and does whatever he wants.
I honestly wonder if this isn’t really a political agenda to make religion and basic democracy look bad on a number of fronts; not just homosexuality? Pat Buchanan and Tammy Bruce make those type of arguments in their books.
All the while people with same sex attraction and identify as gay, and I will assume have good intentions, are being emotionally put through the wringer with unprecedented pressure that will only bring more hurt and confusion…not an end.
Thomas: “I honestly wonder if this isn’t really a political agenda to make religion and basic democracy look bad on a number of fronts; not just homosexuality?”
Thomas apparently isn’t reading the few information sources he quotes. Has he forgotten that, just a few paragraphs earlier, he wrote that Barney Frank (and, for that matter, much of the gay activist leadership) opposed San Francisco’s fast-track approval of marriages?
Thomas: “Pat Buchanan and Tammy Bruce make those type of arguments in their books.”
Buchanan is known by most Americans, even most conservatives, for adversarial polemics and racism. The less-known Bruce writes polemical books similar to those of Ann Coulter, issuing sweeping generalizations with a tendency to ignore evidence running contrary to her arguments. It’s unfortunate, I think, that a leader of Exodus sees these individuals as reliable or constructive sources — or uses them to support his own arguments.
Thomas closes by quoting R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who claims to speak for “God and man” in condemning the news from San Francisco while rallying antigay troops to “defend” marriage against an “onslaught.”
Where gay couples see love, religious expression, parenting, and privacy as their goal, Thomas and Mohler seem to see anger, atheism, treason, and warfare.
Addendum, Feb. 20: Why is it that when anti-abortion demonstrators commit illegal actions to protect unborn children, they are likened by the Christian Right to martyrs, but when couples get married, they are likened to Nazis and antidemocratic anarchists? I sense a double standard here.
President Mohler surveys the culture and sees moral decline and I would agree with his assessment. So, we are looking at a failure. There are two options at looking at failure: one is to do the hard analysis and take the hard looks to see how we are part of the problem. Or, we can concoct an elitist conspiratorial juggernaut. The latter approach allows you to short circuit the earlier hard questions. While the first approach is self-correcting where errors and sins are dealt with, the latter approach never fixes anything because there is always another juggernaut around the corner. As the church lady said, “How convenient.”
John Kusch gets it but I would add another case.
The opponents of gay marriage believe that allowing for gay marriage will coerce their religious beliefs and trample their religious liberties.
This most likely strikes you all as bizarre so I will slow down the reasoning on this.
Evangelical theology believes that you need to evangelize but the acceptance of the Gospel must be by a so-called free choice. A coerced choice is worthless. There is also an analogous freedom of conscience that is also implied here. So, if you force the opponents of gay marriage to believe something they don’t, they see that as not a threat to their family but a threat to their religion, even their immortal soul.
At this point I am sure many of you are saying but wait a minute I am the one whose style is cramped, not the other way around. There is a fundamental reason why BOTH sides believe the other is coercing them.
This is the selling problem. Evangelicals, including myself, would like you to accept the Gospel. You would like evangelicals to treat you with dignity and respect, allowing you to enter into marriage. For either of us to get our way, we need to “sell” something. The problem is the “buyer” almost always feels coerced no matter how reasonable the salesperson is trying to be.
Herein lies our common ground. We have been in both roles. So, when we are selling we need to remember what it feels like to be sold. When we are being sold we need to remember what it feels like to be selling.
Thus, we can discuss and debate the issues at hand. On some things we may agree and on others we may disagree. Hopefully, in the end neither of us will feel coerced and believe that we arrived at our respective conclusions freely and in good conscience. I believe we will be surprised at how many things we can agree upon if we choose to act in this fashion.
Now there is one more thing that is crucial for this to work: I cannot ask you to go first, or vice versa. So, I choose to take the first step, believing you are not trying to coerce me and understanding that my beliefs may be perceived as a threat by you.
I don’t know every time period seems to have folks who believe that society is in moral decline. If that were true we should have reached rock bottom by now. Yet some how society goes on. I tend to take the view that some things improve and some things don’t.
Also in some ways ours is a much more honest society than it was in the past. People today tend to get divorced as opposed to abandon their spouses or have affairs. Shoplifting from a modern store is probably much harder today than it was in the past and some how I think it would have been much easier to be a murder before there were organized police forces than afterwards.
A lot of the ex-gay problem isn’t sexuality. It is the us-them of religious politics that has been going on for centuries. At one time both Catholics and Protestants did not believe the opposite party to be true Christians. Proof of Christianity was in your beliefs as to things like the number of sacraments or in things such as not the earth is at the center of the universe (the latest scientific controversy). Catholics did not belive protest marriages to be valid and when Protestants came to power they did the same.
Today proof of Christianity to the conservatives are in questions like where do you stand on abortion or Is homosexuality sinful (In which case it can not be a part of nature as modern science seems to suggest.). The question of gay marriage is just the newest controversy that requires a predetermined stance. To them to embrace their homosexuality in any way is tantamount to not being Christian.
The word fundamentalist originally came from a work called The Fundamentals, a series that was written at the turn of the Twentieth Century. In it were a series of non-negotiables vis-a-vis Modernism. Funny, though, the current trinity of non-negotiable doctrines — anti-homosexuality, anti-abortion, and anti-evolution — were noticably absent from that work. I am not saying the authors of The Fundamentals would have not have held to the doctrines in question. Rather, I am saying they were not the non-negotiables. Some might say that abortion and homosexuality weren’t controverted then. True, but evolution was and B.B. Warfield, one of the authors of the Fundamentals, taught that theistic evolution was OK.
I have argued elsewhere the Religious Right is not conservative. Here I contend they are not really Fundamentalist as originally defined, nor Evangelical where the Gospel — the Evangel if you will — is the core fundamental.
“Addendum, Feb. 20: Why is it that when anti-abortion demonstrators commit illegal actions to protect unborn children, they are likened by the Christian Right to martyrs, but when couples get married, they are likened to Nazis and antidemocratic anarchists? I sense a double standard here.”
When anti-abortionists take illegal actions to protect unborn children, they are trying to save human beings from murder. When gay couples receive marraige licenses in defiance of the law, well, regardless of whether you think gay marriage should be legal or not, they aren’t saving any lives. They shouldn’t be likened to Nazis, but they are not up there with the heroes of the pro-life movement.