Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
Disco. Inst. blogger and staff member for the Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family wonders:
Are gay rights groups turning into hate groups?No.
This has been your simple answer to another stupid question.
Cothran's argument is actually much stupider than it might seem:
For all their rhetoric about tolerance and diversity, when it comes right down to it the Tolerance Police really don't give a rip about anything other then imposing their own political agenda. And if you don't go along with it, they'll call you names, question your integrity, and now this.The link originally attached to "this" goes to racial profiling and Japanese internment advocate Michelle Malkin, who notes that some blogs got pretty angry about the passage of Prop. 8, and said intemperate things. Fearsome.
Cothran proceeds:
Most gay rights groups have not explicitly called for violence,Indeed, none have, to the best of my knowledge.
but they positively glory in hurling hateful epithets like "bigot" at their opponentsBigotry is indeed hateful. Trying to take away people's marriages, simply because one is prejudiced against those people's sexualities, is bigotry. And that's hateful. If Cothran doesn't like it, he should stop the bigotry.
and accusing them of all sorts of malicious motives simply because they don't want to be forced to repudiate their beliefs about sexuality.Oh, for the love of… Believe whatever you want. The question, less stupid than the one Cothran originally posed, is whether you should be enacting discriminatory social policies on the basis of those personal beliefs. The answer is still: No.
That leads to things like the eugenic anti-miscegenation laws struck down in 1967's Loving v. Virginia (several years after our biracial President-elect's parents were able to marry in Hawaii), and before that in a California Supreme Court ruling from the 1940s which was the basis for the decision which (all-too-briefly) allowed full marriage equality in California. Cothran's argument would apply equally well (modulo small changes in wording) to those earlier laws, which suggests that it is not the way we should be making policy.
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Comments
This is a good rule of thumb for evaluating the arguments in favor of the gay marriage ban. If the same reasoning could be (or was) used against Loving vs Virginia, then the argument is clearly bull. No further analysis required.
Posted by: Joseph Hewitt | November 12, 2008 2:13 AM
Shorter right-wing: "Help Help! I'm bein' repressed! Come see the violence inherent in the Liberals!"
The right doesn't do nuance. Not all anger leads to violence, so you do have to read the actual words. 'Hate groups' might be defined by a call for discrimination. What does that make the Mormon church?
Posted by: george.wiman | November 12, 2008 7:31 AM
They fear because they are afraid. Without the strength a true belief would provide, they need to strike out at anything and everything they feel diminishes their faith. They are hollow, empty and devoid of the least shred of decency their so-called religion espouses. True faith and a real moral fiber wouldn't need to denigrate others.
Posted by: Mike | November 12, 2008 8:05 AM
The bumper sticker, KANSAS: AS BIGoted AS YOU THINK, should now read Kansas: as bigoted as California.
Posted by: Marge | November 12, 2008 9:46 AM