Gay Rights
stcynic | June 6, 2006Jon Rowe and Jason Kuznicki both have excellent posts at Positive Liberty about responding to arguments against gay marriage. These essays are both well reasoned and politely reasonable, and devoid of any shrill or exaggerated rhetoric. Great examples of why I hold them both in such high esteem. Any of my readers here who do not read both Jon and Jason every day really are missing out on a lot of great writing.
stcynic | June 6, 2006The White House has been kind enough to put the text of President Bush's speech advocating the "Marriage Protection Amendment" yesterday on their webpage. It would make a perfect example of illogical argumentation for a logic course.
The union of a man and woman in marriage is the most enduring and important human institution.
But apparently not so enduring that it can't withstand more people getting married.
For ages, in every culture, human beings have understood that marriage is critical to the well-being of families. And because families pass along values and shape character, marriage is…
stcynic | June 5, 2006"Stanley Kurtz is the 'EverReady Bunny' of the same-sex marriage debate, a character who moves forward unrelentingly on a quest to prove that same-sex marriages are harmful. He is sure that state recognition of lesbian and gay unions in Europe has harmed the institution of marriage. But he never quite settles on a reason why this should be so, and his most recent argument illustrates the wildly unscientific thinking behind a lot of the American opposition to same-sex marriage.
So begins this article by William Eskridge and Darren Spedale, which answers this article by the one and only Stanley…
stcynic | June 5, 2006This may be the weakest argument against gay marriage I've heard:
And Professor Robert George, a Princeton University constitutional scholar and co-founder of the Religious Coalition for Marriage, points to another danger to be avoided. In a recent Associated Press interview, he noted that if homosexual marriage is legalized, individuals who believe in traditional marriage could be treated as bigots and their religious views on homosexual marriage could be subject to attack -- and possibly even prosecution.
Okay, and? Imagine this argument being used against interracial marriage - "If…
stcynic | June 5, 2006John Aravosis of AmericaBlog asks precisely the right question:
Bush says courts shouldn't be permitted to decide who can marry who. That's exactly what happened in Loving v. Virginia, and the public was NOT happy about it. So, rather than pull some cute argument about how blacks aren't like gays, Bush needs to tell us directly - if the courts aren't empowered to decide who can marry whom, then is the Loving v. VA decision wrong since an activist court overruled the will of the people?
Don't hold your breath waiting for an answer. But in point of fact, we don't need Bush's answer; we have the…
stcynic | June 3, 2006In my post yesterday about gay marriage, I said that no one had yet made a coherent and compelling argument for why gay marriage will harm traditional marriages at all. A commenter named jazzhouse thinks he's come up with such an argument and I thought I'd move it up here to answer it so it doesn't get lost in the comments. Suffice to say that it is nowhere near compelling; some of it, in fact, is quite ridiculous. jazzhouse wrote:
As you know all modern nation-states thrive for five elemental characteristics/responsibilities -- clearly defined and defendable borders, a common language,…
stcynic | June 2, 2006Jonathan Rauch has a terrific column on the politics of the Federal Marriage Amendment (now apparently called the Marriage Protection Amendment). Why would the Republican leadership bother to bring up a bill for a vote that they know has no chance of passing? Pure demagoguery:
The MPA would amend the U.S. Constitution to forbid gay couples to marry. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., says he will bring the amendment up during the week of June 5. It has zero chance of passing by the required 67-vote majority, as Frist knows. In 2004, the amendment garnered only 48 Senate votes, and…
stcynic | June 1, 2006Dale Carpenter, a Volokh conspirator, has written a paper for the Cato Institute on the Federal Marriage Amendment and why those who oppose gay marriage should still oppose amending the Constitution to outlaw it.
stcynic | May 31, 2006I know I spend an inordinate amount of time bashing the Worldnutdaily, but it's just a constant source of amusement for me. It really is mind-boggling to see how transparently irrational their arguments are and how calculated they are to inflame the emotions of their ignorant readers. Here's the latest headline that cracks me up:
Ford Backs Homosexual Polygamy
Golly gee, they do? In a society where most gays still can't get married, Ford supports homosexual polygamy? Do they give free cars to gays who will marry more than one person? Do they put out public service announcements on TV…
stcynic | May 31, 2006When you're emulating the Russians, perhaps it's time to reevaluate your position:
Moscow's influential mayor said on Tuesday the city banned gay activists from holding a parade because it is morally cleaner than the West, which is caught up in "mad licentiousness".
The gay activists tried to hold their protest against homophobia and discrimination at the weekend despite the ban, but were detained by police, abused by militant Christians and attacked by neo-fascists...
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said such an action would have been a desecration of the sacred monument, and rejected Western criticism…
stcynic | May 26, 2006So I posted the other day about the Federal judge striking down Oklahoma's law that prohibited them from recognizing adoptions by gays performed in other states. You had to know the religious right was going to react by throwing a blizzard of empty catchphrases around, right? Here's the little snippet in Agape Press, which labels the report Sooner State judge overrules pro-family statute:
"Another example of judicial activism at its worst." That's how the head of the Family Research Council is reacting to the latest court ruling favoring homosexuals. A U.S. district court judge has declared…
stcynic | May 26, 2006AmericaBlog has a post about a CNN story on therapists trying to convert gays to being ex-gay. I can't get the video to work, but the description is hilarious:
1. Where the gay guy in "therapy" says that the reason he turned gay is that he had "emotional incest" with his mom. Uh huh.
2. The wacky "ex-gay 'therapist'" showing that one way to cure yourself is to take a tennis racket and beat the crap out of a pillow while screaming your mother's name (it's totally freaky). This will help you release "hidden memories in your muscles." Yes, your muscles store memories that make you gay. And don't…
stcynic | May 23, 2006A major legal victory yesterday for gay adoptions came down in the case of Finstuen v. Edmondson. The case, brought by the Lambda Legal Fund on behalf of three sets of gay parents with adopted children, challenged an Oklahoma law that forbid the state from recognizing gay adoptions from other states as legal. That law obviously threatens to break up families if they have to relocate to, or even visit, Oklahoma. As Lambda put it in their press release, the law "had the potential to make children adopted by same-sex couples in other states legal orphans when the families are in Oklahoma." The…
stcynic | May 19, 2006Bill Frist has announced that he plans to bring up the Federal Marriage Amendment for another vote in the Senate in early June, so expect the next few weeks to be filled with all sorts of nonsense about how gay marriage will make the baby Jesus cry and let the terrorists win. The amendment has less of a chance of passing than it had two years ago, when it failed to get the 2/3 required to pass it. So why bring it up again? Political posturing, of course. The mid-term elections are in November and it's vitally important to say that one's opponent voted against it 4 times rather than only 3.
stcynic | May 17, 2006The Southern Poverty Law Center has a full report on the ridiculous pseudo-scholarship of raving anti-gay loony Paul Cameron. There may not have been a less credible "scholar" in the last century. If he said the sky was blue, I'd double check his findings.
stcynic | May 17, 2006You've gotta love this kind of pointless snarkiness. It comes from David Limbaugh (yes, Rush's brother) and it's the perfect combination of smugness and stupidity:
I suppose it's a matter of one's perspective, but it sure seems to me that if there is any special interest group aggressively pushing its agenda on society, it's the radical homosexual lobby. I don't assert this as some earth-shattering revelation or to prove my superior powers of observation. But it is amazing how many people have swallowed the homosexual activists' propaganda that it is heterosexual conservatives who are picking…
stcynic | May 12, 2006I've written several times in the past about the homophobe lobby and Ford. They've been urging a boycott of Ford because - gasp! - they advertise and sell cars to gay people. Apparently gays are supposed to walk everywhere, or hitch rides with the Amish in their buggies. But their latest attack on Ford is incredibly brazen. At the annual shareholder's meeting, going on right now in Deleware, they tried to pass a resolution amending the company's equal employment opportunity rules to take out sexual orientation. Now, there's no point in removing sexual orientation from the discrimination rules…
stcynic | May 10, 2006Agape Press reports that the Traditional Values Coalition, one of the approximately 10,000 different religious right groups all complaining about the same things, is upset that CBS is showing a "pro-gay" public service announcement at the end of a soap opera:
A conservative group is criticizing CBS Television for airing a pro-homosexual public service announcement during a daytime soap opera. The network was to air the PSA at the end of today's episode of As the World Turns, which featured a teen character who tells his parents he is homosexual.
The PSA urges viewers to "take a stand against…
stcynic | May 9, 2006One of the most valuable and interesting trends of the last decade has been the formation of Gay/Straight Alliances in high schools around the country. I think it's valuable because, obviously, I think it's very important for straight people to stand side by side with our gay friends and fight for their rights. We should not treat the issue as just their problem; it is our problem as well. But naturally, the religious right is absolutely appalled by such clubs and want them gone. And in some cases, they're winning.
At South Rowan High School, near Charlotte, NC, Flip Benham's group Operation…
stcynic | April 29, 2006Also at Positive Liberty, Jon Rowe has a post about David Kupelian's book The Marketing of Evil. Kupelian is one of the big muckety mucks at the Worldnutdaily and his book is full of the sort of breathless and ridiculous "the fags are coming, the fags are coming" rhetoric that is de rigeur at that terminally silly webpage. As Rowe points out, Kupelian's book spins a web of conspiracy around a book called After the Ball, written by a couple of gay rights activists back in the 80s, a book that was out of print and virtually unknown until Kupelian revived it. Now it's being bought up by…