Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

note the Devil's advocate comment

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

I did. It had to be pointed out anyway.

I wasn't aware that Democracy was ever really supposed to do anything in the interest of the minority, as the majority is the group that puts officials in power... Still playing Devil's advocate here (WHHEEEEE This is fun!)...

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

The idea behind democracy is not to create a system in which a majority can overwhelm and oppress a minority (like in Nazi Germany), but to help foster a sense of community concensus. It is supposed to give everyone a chance to voice their opinions on important topics, even if voiced through an elected representative. But in order for a democracy to work well, it should employ compromise, checks and balances, dialogue, etc., to insure that unity is built. That, I feel, is the inherent problem in a bipartisan government like our own. Rather than building concensus, it polarizes people into two camps. I rarely feel as if either camp does a fair job of representing ME or MY CONCERNS.

And the Founding Fathers did believe in building concensus. That's why they designed the governmental system with checks and balances. But if a governmental system were truly seeking concensus, it would not marginalize minorities, but take their needs into consideration as well. I personally think that a lot of the hot button issues could be solved rather quickly if both parties considered the concerns of the other and tried to find some approach to the problem taking into account both sets of needs. It's called COMPROMISE, and at one time it wasn't considered a dirty word.

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Don't quit your day job.

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doesn't abortion belong in its own thread?

For those of you who are conveniently detatched from the gay marriage debate (i.e. those of you who have your minds made up but have never actually discussed the issue with a gay person), here's a post by someone directly effected by the new marriage discrimination measure in Oregon. On Tuesday eleven states decided to treat hundreds of thousands, of people in their communities as sub-human. Congrats.

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On yeah, one thing I should say 'cause I haven't made it clear yet: I'm actually against gay marriage, but only because I'm against marriage in general.[/cynic]

(But that doesn't mean the state should enforce it.)

I'm very much against state-sponsored marriage. The state has no right or reason to define what relationships between consenting adults are valid. I believe that if the state is going to validate any one sort of interpersonal relationship, then it has an obligation to validate them all. If it's unwilling to do that (and clearly it is), then it needs to get out of the marriage business entirely.

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Alright, I think I've read enough on this topic to make a few comments and state a few opinions.

The Bible. Looking through history, there have been some events that would cause authority to discourage homosexuality. For example, the Black Death of the Middle Ages. This wiped out a considerable amount of the world's population, and (this may be only a theory, but bear with me) at the time, the church was a unifying factor between kingdoms, and therefore had a lot of authority. Translating the bible into a form digestable by the literate nobility (and indirectly, the illiterate masses), the church may have manipulated the meaning of some of the words to eliminate the threat of homosexuality. The threat of course, being the simple fact that homosexual relationships do not result in offspring. And those who quote Leviticus should pay attention to its other parts. If I hear you say that you're against homosexuality because Leviticus said so, I better not smell shrimp or pork on your breath and see you sporting a nice new hairdo.

State Controlled Marriage. I do believe that it is in the power of the individual states. Otherwise, there wouldn't be proposals to amend state constitutions, or states who allow civil unions (Vermont) or states who allow marriage (Massachusetts). There is a difference between civil unions and marriage, by the way.

Nature/Nurture. This whole nature/nurture argument confuses me a bit (Nature: born with "the gay"/Nurture: you learn the behaviours). In my opinion, everybody falls somewhere on the spectrum, and very few people fall on the extreme left or the extreme right of the spectrum (totally gay or totally straight). It's just a matter of being comfortable enough with yourself to admit it.

Sanctity of Marriage. DOMA: The Defense of Marriage Act. The first target of these peoples' agendas should be the extraordinarily high divorce rate, not the destruction of hope for people who love each other.

fatpie. I read a lot of posts by this one. Lots of quotes from the bible, and little (if any) support. I also noticed that he is 14. Not that it invalidates his opinon, but please, fatpie... wait just a few more years. Once you venture out beyond the shelter of your parents and start switching on to things you never really knew, you'll find that your opinion may need reevaluation.

Feel free to tear into me, I wrote this in two minutes and didn't really prepare for a list of citations. I think that's it for me, I have to get ready to go to work.

-Lucky-X-Dee-Six

Not true. In case you didn't know, the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. The Bible used by the Church of the Middle Ages was Jerome's Vulgate. However, the Hebrew and Greek texts are still available to us, and the words used in both of those languages are distinctly people who have homosexual relations without distinction. If you're going to cite biblical translation for your case, try to know what you're talking about. Forgive me if I sound a bit arrogant, but as a Bible scholar and a clergyman, I feel I am better qualified to expound on biblical history.


I am not sure what you mean by this. It is a simple question: do you have sex with people of your own gender? If not, then you're straight. If yes, then you're gay. Those in the middle are what we would call bisexual. I don't know about you, but I have never considered having sex with another man, and most probably won't ever.


I agree with this, though. The appallingly high divorce rate has a far greater impact on our society than homosexual relationships. If these people really cared about the sanctity of marriage, then they should focus more of their efforts on divorce prevention.

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Yeah, I knew I should have studied more That whole bible translation thing came from a lot of hear-say.

2: I'm in the middle.

Thanks for the fact-check!

LuckyX6

You're welcome.

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Most will respond to this by saying Leviticus mandated "purity" codes, which no longer apply, and "moral" codes, which do. The problem I have with that idea is that this doesn't mean this particular law is a "moral" code rather than a "purity" one.

It would seem to mean that Jews should not practice homosexuality, though, but that has nothing to do with state law.



And what exactly is it? Remember we're talking about this from the government's secular perspective. I remember it was once compared to the doctrine of "separate but equal", which has proven that separate is never equal. In other words, the implication is: they're exactly the same except civil unions are somehow less than marriage.

EDIT

Just saw something in Didymus' post I wanted to respond to, and didn't want to double-post so soon.



A great many people, myself included (I won't go so far as to say "most people", though) don't feel it's that simple. Heck, I feel that even the "straight/gay/bi" trichotomy isn't good enough. Moreover, there's more to sexual orientation than who you would actually have sex with. Some gay people have no interest in sex at all. So do some straight people, and so do some bisexual people. The number of such people are small, since we're talking about fractions of fractions here, but they're there.

But in any case, I never cared for the idea that "You're either gay or straight, or else you're bi". I'm not going to stand for anybody telling me who I am. People want to draw arbitrary hard lines because they think it's easier that way. What they fail to realize is: things like this are never easy.

- Kef

Then answer me this: exactly what DOES make for sexual orientation other than sexual preference? Maybe this is something I haven't given much thought because I am straight.

I will admit, though, that I did not factor in celibacy. Do you feel like celibate people who have little or no interest in sexuality fit on that scale at all?

I was responding to LuckyX6's point that there are no people who are truly gay or truly straight. I didn't think his sliding scale model was accurate. And I still don't.

As for purity vs. moral laws:

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I'd say more than anything it'd be desire for a certain kind of intimacy. This intimacy doesn't have to be sexual, it's just that sexuality usually plays a part in it. Physical attraction does play a part, though, for instance, what if you have a guy who only desires that intimacy with other guys but is only physically turned on by females? Assigning any of the common labels to this guy is oversimplifying. Of course you can still do it, but people will have different ideas of what the labels mean and disagree with you, which I think shows just how arbitrary they are. The classifications may be simple and logical but they don't model reality. Try doing math with just integers: they're simple, logical, but they omit potential information (which may or may not be there) and they often don't model reality. Sometimes they do, sometimes they're close, but they can be way off. Likewise, people often fit well into the basic categories, but few people fit perfectly and some just don't fit in at all.



On a linear sliding scale? Nah, not really. Let alone into a singular "gay/straight/bi" classification.



It's not that there are no people who are, it's that there are few people who are. You could well be 100% straight, I don't know and I'm probably not going to unless I ask you lots of questions you'd rather not answer. I, too, think the sliding scale model is not "accurate", but for the opposite reason: not that it makes too many distinctions, but because it doesn't make enough.



Aha, but you missed something: for this argument to work we must first agree that it was example of sexual immorality in the first place! It doesn't specifically refer to that passage of Leviticus, unless there's surrounding context you've omitted. It's an odd kind of circular argument: you seem to be saying it's clearly an example of a moral code because later it refers to "sexual immorality", but for "sexual immorality" to refer to that we must first assume it was a moral code to begin with. Can you demonstrate that it refers to that without forcing us to make the assumption in the first place? Or am I totally misunderstanding the intent of your quote here?

- Kef

hey guys, guess what? Saskatchewan sez: gay marriage ok!

with all these gay marriages, I'm sure Canada will be crumbling into anarchy any day now.

1 Timothy 1:10 equates sexual immorality (pornois) and homosexuality (arsenokoitais), and lists them along with other sins of immorality.

1 Corinthians 6:9 also lists arsenokoitai among a list of immoral sins.

And FYI, arsenokoitos is specifically a man who has any kind of sexual relations with another man. Both the Old and the New Testaments strictly forbid this behavior. We’ve been over this before on this thread. The Bible does clearly define arsenokoitos as immoral.

Does this mean that, to quote that one guy, “God hates fags”? I do not say that. In fact, 1 Corinthians 6:11 goes on to say, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

Pornos is a man who commits any type of sexual immorality, whereas arsenokoitos is specifically a man who commits homosexuality. Definitions of Greek terms come from Bauer/Danker A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature.

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Was that sarcasm? I hope so, and I think so, but you can never be sure...

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"You get the Most Annoying Transsexual I've Ever Spoken To award." -The Zephyr Song

very much so.

I'm still not convinced about that. Don't tell me, show me. By the way, this still shows nothing about what the book of Leviticus intended, either, unless you believe the Bible has some inherent unity even across the boundaries of time (and the Old Testament versus New Testament), which, frankly, I don't. Moses didn't know what the future generations would write.

Also, context is important to consider as well. Everybody knows that by taking something out of context, you can make it look like somebody said something completely different from what they intended. For instance, it is well known that Ken Olsen, CEO of DEC at the time (1977), uttered, "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." He did say this, and the entire world laughed at him for it because they were not given the surrounding context: Ken was talking about computers that controlled the home, not PCs. (In fact, DEC was selling the equivalent of PCs at the time, so the notion that Ken was even talking about them is silly.) But when you just consider the immediate sentence, it seems clear, unambiguous, and obvious that he's saying that PCs are worthless. But there was more than the immediate sentence and it wasn't what he was saying. (For more details: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp)

The point of all that being that context can sometimes allow alternate interpretations, which I believe you still have completely failed to acknowledge. (Yes, I know we debated some of that context but I still never arrived at any satisfactory conclusion.) Again, I do not doubt your credentials, but credentials do not eliminate the possibility you're wrong about something. I don't want you to admit that you're wrong, I want you to acknowledge the possibility that you might be.



But first we must agree on what the behavior is.



Yeah, we've been over it before, but the first time around we had to deal with that ignoramus, which was distracting and fruitless. If we must go over it again, then we must. I certainly never agreed that it was clear. (Sure, it may clearly say "arsenokoitos is immoral", but the implications of the statement are not so clear.) I think if there can reasonably be disagreement over whether something is clear or not, it isn't.



Only one source? And a likely biased one at that!

- Kef

I was basing that on the in-depth psychological studies by Dr. Alfred Kinsey that resulted in his Kinsey Scale model. See here: http://www.lgbtcampus.org/resources/training/kinsey_scale.html

It is true however, that celibacy was not a factor. Still trying to find some more information on this.

Adding more information to reference,
LuckyX6

I would questions Kinsey's methodology and results. The final paragraph of that article, the National Health and Social Life Survey, actually seems to place the figures at a much more conservative level.

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And besides, those studies were done a pretty long time ago.

-LuckyX6

I just read a really heartwarming editorial by Steve Silberman, contributing editor to Wired about his marriage to his husband Keith.

I still don't understand what people are so afraid of.

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Ah, okay then. Don't take offence or anything, I just don't really know you and I wouldn't put it past a lot of people to think that.

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"You get the Most Annoying Transsexual I've Ever Spoken To award." -The Zephyr Song

Sexuality is extremely fluid. Each person has his own case. I know many guys who are very friendly and flirtatious with me yet who have no desire to be with me. I know some men who enjoy--well let's just say certain acts considered gay--but not with other men.. (as demonstrated by Stifler's character in Road Trip.. but I know people in rl like that as well). Many people could sleep with both sexes, but that doesn't mean they are confused or unsure about their sexuality.

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I've noticed that there seems to be a lot of blame on gays for the democrats losing. Now, that is just bunk. It's all about the framing. Conservatives like to say that "the country is under attack.. the sanctity of marriage is being destroyed".. as though the act of giving out rights and freedom to fellow Americans was more of a threat than imminent death of soldiers in Iraq and unemployment of the people!! Gay people are not a threat to anyone. Democrats lost for a whole variety of reasons.. don't just dump it all on homosexuals. I know it's a lot easier to do that, but that's just lazy and completely inaccurate.

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Hot!

I don't think this is accurate. It would be more accurate to say that people are blaming Kerry and the Democratic party on the loss because they failed to distance themselves from the gay rights issue.

I don't agree with that analysis, either, necessarily (as the guy on NPR last night said, the data just doesn't support this claim), but I don't think that anybody is, as you put it, blaming homosexuals themselves for the loss.

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Point taken, although the net affect seems similar. Basically, it seems that now that the election is over, many Dems are trying to somehow win over the love of the religious conservatives by any means possible. I wish they would spend more time uniting their current constituency and coming up with a more clear and positive message.

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Hot!

A win for civil rights in Peru:

Peru gives green light for gays in military to have sex.

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