The Cognitive Dissonance Here Is Appalling

Why not support the traditional Biblical view of marriage – y’know, a dozen wives and a few hundred concubines? 

I see we’ve both seen the same epic video.

The holy book of the majority should dictate the secular laws for everyone else. That’s why divorce is illegal and the icky gays are required to entertain us every time they try to file jointly their taxes.

This is “a new era of McCarthyism,” I tell you. Where is the love for the bigots who get called bigots?

Thanks Cracked.com.

Overall, that article was surprisingly intelligent for being written by an (unnamed) conservative.  In the paragraph following the material cited above, the author writes that “the state has already done plenty to undermine traditional
marriage—no-fault divorce law being perhaps the most egregious example.
Since its advent in 1970, this policy has destabilized marriage like no
other.” Too bad he or she didn’t go on to discuss the fact that many Christians currently have “revolving door” marriages.

He/she goes on: “Nor do we think that the future of marriage or the American experiment
hinges on how we as a nation decide the gay marriage debate . . . Far more than the protection of the legal definition of marriage, what our society needs is a fresh understanding of marriage.”

Exactly. It’s almost as if this writer WANTS to believe that the sky won’t fall or that a plague of locusts won’t descend on America if gays are allowed (oh, that nasty little word, “allowed”) to get married, but just can’t go all the way. But then s/he resorts to the communism argument and it all goes to hell, proving again that faith makes people irrational. What all of this and the anti-gay movement comes down to is that gays make Jesus want to throw up. And that’s why they shouldn’t be allowed to get married.

It’s “CHRISTIANITY TODAY.”  Did you really expect anything that smacks of consistency and logic there?

Translation: They know that being bigoted is no longer culturally acceptable, but they wanna be anyway. It’s approximately two steps removed from “…but I have a gay friend.”

Perhaps the “fundamental rights” they are referring to is the right of the dominant religions to dictate and control civil law related to something as personal as who you can love and make commitments with to spend the rest of your life.  But that sounds more like the assumed rights of religious institutions…  not individual rights.

I’ll answer in the same spirit as you asked.

It’s not just a matter of semantics. It’s a matter of treating everyone equally, in action AND in words. For example, if women are granted the right to vote along with all of the legal rights and responsibilities associated with that, but they have to accept this right being called “Enfranchising” instead of “Voting”, you’ve created a group of people that can be labelled as “Other.”

Human rights apply to ALL people, gay, female, trans, straight, brown, whatever. Using language that segregates just to keep some bigots happy is NOT conducive to egalitarianism.

I think Mike D is right and there isn’t a consistent ‘biblical view’ of marriage. I think it’s interesting when so much time is spent on enforcing traditional orthodoxy as secular law and nothing spent on the major issues that Jesus seemed to of spent his life focusing on. Like taking care of the sick and those in need. And David gays don’t make Jesus throw up, he never mentions anything about homosexuality in whats recorded. I enjoy the blog Hemant, I am a student of the way of Jesus as I like to phrase it and I was just curious what everyone commenting here gathers is the point of Christianity? Whats at the heart of it? What do you gather from everything you here out of camps of Christianity? I ask not in an attempt to turn it around and try to get everyone to be a Christian that’s not near my aim. Its an honest question.

The Christian majority in North Carolina recently changed their state constitution to outlaw even civil unions. Some Christians there (although a minority) want to build concentration camps for people with same-sex attraction. There are real problems within Christendom.

I don’t think there is any cognitive dissonance here at all. I believe their statement that they believe gays should have the same rights as others is a lie- a conscious, deliberate lie stated because it is no longer possible in today’s social climate to argue for what they actually believe, that gays are sinners who they’d like to see punished. So they lie about what rights they think gays should have, while at the same time advancing actual policies that contradict that lie.

Ahh, Christianity Today. They love to appear all moderate and “in-tune” with today’s culture, and the face of “intelligent” evangelicalism. But however hard they try, they’re still handcuffed to the Bible and it’s undeniable primitive cultural norms.

It’s still a slap in the face.  What is the purpose of having TWO identical institutions, which do exactly the same job, operating parallel to each other, OTHER than segregation?  If we ALL use the same process for the same result, then we can all use the same name.

It’s more likely that they have a very idea about what “fundamental rights” are. Until rather recently “gay rights” mostly meant anti-discrimination laws, like not being fired from a job for being gay. It didn’t necessarily include the right to have one’s relationships legally recognized.

I would love to ask any Christian with this opinion whether or not they would object to a law that prohibits people of the same religion from marrying. After all, if you really want to get married, you could always just convert. Who says it’s a fundamental right to marry someone of the same religion?

[edited for clarity]

Remember “Separate but Equal”? 

Same thing. 

Your religion has no right to dictate how the secular law can use words. Especially when it comes to basic human rights.

 To you this is sarcasm, but I have honestly heard this argument.

 If one looks at all the polls of self identified evangelical Christians, the number of them that want to see anti-sodomy laws back on the books  (and enforced) is stunning. If it it’s narrowed  down a little further to fundamentalists,  the number becomes a large percentage. Every poll bears this out.

I expect that for a large  percentage of  North Carolina  religious right fudies that say they don’t want to put gays in concentration camps, it’s just a difference of degree.  I bet if those same people were asked if anti-sodomy laws  should be back on the books, they would answer with a resounding “yes”!

 As well as being reflected in all the polls, right wing fundies make no bones about wanting to bring back anti-sodomy laws. I live in Texas, and your average blue collar religious right whack job has no problem telling you that to your face.

They don’t understand what’s wrong with what they’re saying. I’ve heard it argued many times by Christians that gays aren’t denied any rights because they can marry the opposite sex like anyone else. The people who said this to me were being sincere.

An anti-sodomy law that, I am sure, would only be wielded against gays. I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume that social conservative men are shoving their wangs up their girlfriends’/wives’ asses for the occasional change of pace. Also blowjobs (assuming ‘sodomy’ covers any non-penis-to-vagina sex).

And up their boyfriends’ asses as well. They just have to be a bit more covert about it than non-hypocrites.

Not sure. Some of them claim they have “equal rights” to marry anyone of the opposite gender just like everyone else. When presented with the argument that that’s not really equal and just happens to coincide with their prejudices, they just blink and act confused.

So true. I’ve yet to read even one remotely sensible article there. Even though they’re not complete lunatics they’re still a bunch of idiots

Yeah it’s the most idiotic thing. Santorum goes on record on numerous TV and public appearances saying that the f****** sex police should be able to arrest adults in their own houses for private consensual  behavior. Then he turns around and says HE HAS FRIENDS AMONG THE VERY PEOPLE THAT HE WANTS ARRESTED!  Unbelievable.

Then that SNL alumni dipshit shoots of her mouth about how disgusting it was that the gay character kissed another guy on the “Glee” TV show. Then towards the end of the interview she yells out that she has gay friends  . Do these people know how stupid they sound when they talk out of both sides of their mouths (often in the same interview)?

To be clear, I think that cognitive dissonance is the rule in the sheep. I think it’s the bloggers, and pastors, and politicians who are deliberately lying. The sheep suck it up without much thought, and that’s why they can’t respond when critically challenged.

Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.

— Henry Ford

Somone used it in earnest here, just a day or two ago!  (In one of the Chick-Fil-A posts, I think)

I think a number of progressive but Biblical Christians want the law to treat everyone fairly but to reserve the use of the term “marriage” for one man and one woman.

Who the F cares what some “progressive but Biblical Christians” want when it comes to civil marriage??

When are they going to get it through their collectively thick skull that they are not the arbiters of civil marriage, nor do they ‘own’ it?  You make this statement as though they have some special ‘say’ or veto power in this whole thing……they don’t.

So, it would be nice if they recognized this and stopped acting as though they should get some kind of ‘final say’ on the matter. 

It’s utterly ridiculous, and frankly, getting reeeeeeally tiresome to hear.
+ d            

Yeah, they need to get over being offended when they are told to mind their own goddamn business and that they don’t have a say in the matter when it comes to other people’s personal lives…..’cause that’s the answer that THEY would give if we said that their lifestyle is offensive to us and their gaudy monstrosity of a church is an eyesore. 

They can disagree with someone’s personal choices till the cow’s come home but, as you say, they don’t have any special rights or powers to say yay or nay to anything when it comes to other folk’s life choices.

And until Loving v. Virginia, they believed that every black and white person had equal rights to marry someone of the same color.  

 Here’s how you do it:    Both forms of the union have exactly equal legal benefits.  The gays get to pick which gets which name goes with which.  How will the Christians react?

It’s called the “one kid cuts the cake, the other chooses” rule.  It’s amazingly useful for cutting through either cake, or bullshit.

Try reading all the comments that address this fallacy before spouting off your bigoted nonsense.

 It’s not so much a matter of religion dictating how you use a word.  We’re talking about the legal system.

I say that if it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has a bill does it matter much what you call it? 

If the Free Exercise Clause was revoked, would it be okay if the government made Buddhism the only allowable religion?  Everybody would have the same right to be Buddhist!

 Hole crap that’s a new level of disingenuous. It’s like illegalizing all political parties except one, and then you complain and they tell you “I don’t understand, you can vote for The Party like everyone else!”

It would be a serious deviation in character from Cheepak’s other comments on this blog.  I think poorly presented satire.  It happens to me on here.

Marriage is a religious tradition, and any involvement of government in trying to define ‘marriage’
would go directly against the basic principles of separation of church and
state.

That’s my copypasted opinion from http://harmful.cat-v.org/society/gay_marriage

“Friends” may very well just mean, “I smiled at them and didn’t insult them to their face and I didn’t quite want to throw up afterwards!”

The Romans already had entirely secular marriages and marriage is a legal contract today again. Religious institutions merely perform a superfluous and optional ceremony.

The Catholic Church didn’t even get involved in the marriage business until some time around the 12th or 13th  century. Before that it mostly kept Roman family law. Priests weren’t required to perform a marriage for it to be legal and common law marriage was the norm.

 Thanks for the response Silo. I think everything you said is pretty much right on. What I find pretty interesting, or sad I guess. Is that what Christianity early on was doing was attempting to unite two people groups that had been strictly divided in the past. There is even a point in a letter Paul may or may not have written that says the purpose of Jesus was to make the two one. It was a uniting movement, not a dividing one. I think if you took that early framework and applied it today it would be a much different picture where Christians might be trying to unite themselves and others and celebrate differences within that unity. But somehow, in many of the ways you mention, it has become an overtly divisive movement, with serious ‘in’ or ‘out’ rhetoric.

 Thats a bit post foundational, as is Augustine.

Not really. Christianity as we know it today was invented out of almost nothing in the 3rd and 4th centuries. Before that there were different sects with often radically differing beliefs that would be unrecognizable as Christian today. Some of them doubted the divinity of Jesus for example and only saw him a man. Unfortunately, the god-people won and they were declared heretics.

The Texas anti-sodomy statute only applied to gays.  The law had already been altered so it didn’t apply to gender-discordant couples before the SCOTUS decision.

However I do think there is a brokenness to humanity as a whole, i think its hard to deny this in  a quick observation of the world. However you want to translate it brokeness, flaw, evil, dickishness.

Well, I would disagree strongly. I do not think humanity is broken. We are not perfect. Nothing is perfect, but there is no fundamental flaw within us. When people have their basic needs met, when children are raised in loving and secure homes and societies, then humanity is, for the most part, fundamentally decent. War, poverty, and abuse are not the result of something wrong within us. They are most often the result of people struggling to survive in terrible conditions. I don’t think those people are “born bad.” They are usually reacting to things beyond their control. Many people are born into oppressive, violent situations. But given a choice, people want stable, peaceful lives. They want safe homes and safe communities.

And that is the problem with Christianity, as I see it. Christians think there is something wrong with us. That the world is fallen and broken, and that “heaven” (assumed to be an actual place) is the only thing that’s perfect. I think it’s tragic that so many people ignore or discount life on earth, in favor of what I see as an imaginary afterlife. This world is all we have, and slamming it as inferior and broken bothers me. It leads to complacency. Why bother working for justice and equality if this life doesn’t matter, and everyone goes to a perfect afterlife when they die?

If you don’t believe in an afterlife and want to work to make “heaven on earth,” I do support your efforts, but I think it makes you very unusual among Christians. The vast majority seem to believe their afterlife is literal, not metaphorical.

Perhaps they don’t believe that marriage is a fundamental right.  That’s the only way those sentences make sense together.

 Right, Augustine and the third and fourth centuries are foundational to orthodox Christianity, but not the Jesus movement. The Jesus movement was alive and well and I think it was its strength that it was diverse and believed in different things because the point wasn’t the doctrinal codes but living the way of love.

No, I don’t think something is very wrong. You seem to be assuming that the world is supposed to be perfect. It’s not perfect, it was never perfect, and there is no perfect species. Human beings are mammals like any other. When they have their basic needs met and are raised in stable families and communities, then crime is generally low. The vast majority of people don’t commit crimes for no reason.

How did we get to the point where people are born into such oppressive and violent situations if not for the dickishness of some.

There was never a time when people weren’t born into those situations. It’s not like there’s a perfect time in history that we need to get back to. Actually, things have only improved. Read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature to see how violence has declined over time.

And you cant say that there aren’t people who are born into wonderfully loving homes having everything they need and turn out to be dicks oppressing other people.

Very few. The vast majority of people don’t commit crimes for fun. There may be some people who are born with brain damage or mental instability that leads to violence, but most children who are raised in loving and secure situations develop a sense of empathy for others. Crime generally results from poverty, abuse, addiction, or other situations in which a person’s sense of right and wrong is blunted by harsh circumstances.

Yes, it’s a matter of semantics but if it gets society over the impediments to fair treatment for everybody it is worth it?

But *could* it truly get everybody over the impediments as efficiently as using the understood word?

Seems to me that if we have “marriage” and we have “partnerships” or “unions”, then we still have room for schools to ask for a higher standard of proof that a stepparent can pick up a child from school – after all, the parents aren’t “married”, they have a “union”.

Would the various state and federal agencies promptly put “marriage” means “marriage or union” into all the affected regulations and policies?  Or would some things lag? 

Would hospitals and nursing homes and funeral homes really treat a “partner” as a spouse, with no quibbling over whether the partner or the (possibly anti-gay) parents get the final word? 

One of very many problems today is that despite claims that couples can cobble together an approximation of marriage rights by drawing up powers of attorney, medical powers of attorney, wills, etc. – those documents simply aren’t always honored when they are needed.  It’s terribly sad to read of situations where a couple drew up medical powers of attorney specifically so that, if necessary, they could make medical decisions for each other, but when one of them collapsed and was taken to the hospital, the hospital blatantly ignored the legal documents, excluded the healthy partner from all decisions, and didn’t even allow the healthy partner into the room (only family members, after all!).

I say that if it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has a bill does it matter much what you call it? 

It matters when the average American (or anyone else) hears “duck” and thinks “Daffy” but hears “duck-like waterfowl” and thinks of the noisy flocks flying overhead in a V.  They may or may not have all the same parts, but … 

The observer has a pretty good notion of what rights come with “marriage”, and may have a whole different set of assumptions (correct or otherwise) about what rights come with “union”.

 I think some people are lying, and others have a warped idea of “equal rights.”  Neither one is universal against the anti-GLBT camp.