“I’m a California doctor who must choose between my faith and my job…”

Buh?  Can doctors be required to officiate at weddings?  Or is it some new tenant of faith that you have to bar gay couples from seeing each other in the event of hospitalization?

Cris—

Man, I was hoping to be the first to jump on that.  A rainbow coalition?  WTF?  Are they going to start putting equals bumper stickers on their cars too?  Assholes.

Well, Antigone, it goes like this.

In order for me to be holy I have to not only live my life according to my faith but I also have the bounden duty to convert others to my faith.  That is why they are called Evangelicals.  It is a nice word for buttinsky.

I not only can’t read porn I have the duty to rid the world of porn.  I not only can’t have an abortion, I can’t let you have one either.

Since the very beginning of this nation there has been a conflict between puritanism and freedome to choose one’s life style.

H.L. Mencken once said, “Puritinism is the deep and abiding fear that some one some where is having fun.”  (or something like that).

Most Christians are not evangelicals though the fundies are loathe to admit it.

NOM?  really?  As in Nom nom nom?

I’ve never seen a group of people whine so much about something that doesn’t affect them at all and doesn’t hurt anyone in the universe.

Magis is right, this is how they view it. Still, one can’t help but splutter “WHAT core civil rights??”

A storm is coming?  Like in Terminator?  Or like Stormfront?  B/c Stormfront is what I thought of with the graphics and the stupid fears.

I’m a Massachusetts parent helplessly watching public schools teach my son that gay marriage is OK…

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  You don’t like the reality that gay marriages don’t harm children and that gay people are human?  Homeschool or private schools were made for your bigotry.  Want free education for your child?  YOU FUCKING SOCIALIST COMMIE!

I’m an Illinois parent royally pissed off that my public school buys books vetted by Christianist Texans that try to tell my child that the Pledge means our country is LED BY GOD.  Please get your fucking unhistory and theocratic tendencies away from my kids!

As for the poor California doctor who has to choose between her faith and her job.  What’s the problem?  You don’t want to prescribe contraception?  You don’t want to inform a rape victim about ovulation prevention with EC?  Too fucking bad.  You make your choices, like everyone else.  If you cannot treat everyone in the public fairly, then you shouldn’t be working in a public service job.

The end of Catholic hospitals cannot come too soon for me.  If you cannot separate your faith from best practices, then you shouldn’t be serving the public.

Oh the storm is coming, you assholes.  Please go Galt and save yourselves!

That responding ad was easily one of the lamest things I’ve ever heard.  It was so damned humourless, earnest and pedantic without actually teaching that I wanted to run out and ban gay marriage despite the fact that I believe in it. Yech.

Antigone:

It is all noble of you and stuff but some problems do not have a solution.  Their thought patterns are irrational, fearful (sometimes to the level of paranoia) and reactive and yours are logical, confident, and pro-active.  Finding a common language is…well….impossible. 

To the True Believer (read Eric Hoffer’s book) any deviation, any revision from THE TRUTH is…well….anathema.

All you can do is defeat them and send them back under their rocks to brood.  Eventually (may it please God) they will fade into irrelevance.

I am goddam sick andtired of these phony assholes who don’t seem to have anything better to do than try to run other people’s lives.

Dear vomitous jackals of the right:  when YOUR marriages are perfect, when YOU aren’t fucking around on your spouses, raping young girls in the name of god, interfering with womens’ rights to their own bodies, and in general, when you start minding your own goddamned business, then maybe we’ll have some respect for that particularly ugly structure you adhere to called “religion.” But, until then, all it is is a way for you to screech and shit on other people. Many of us are sick as hell of your ugly antics.  What you’re doing has NOTHING to do with your magical sky fairy or “his” “love” for all of us. It has everything to do with your hatred of yourselves, and by concatenation, the rest of humanity.

Get over yourselves and get out of everybody else’s life.

You really can’t seem to tell the difference between “losing privilege” and “punishment” can you? - Antigone

Bingo!  I hereby declare (even if it’s not my place to do so) that Antigone wins the thread!

*

Deja Thoris:  didn’t a certain person known as Jesus say the same thing to not only the vomitous jackals of the right in his day but also the wishy-washy centrist “sensible liberal” types?

Blocking someone else’s rights is not a right

Sorry fundies, bigotry is not a right, it is a shameful hateful condition you suffer and you better cut that out!

So, I’m reading that list and breaking out the world’s smallest violin. And seriously ... NOM??

What about all the Christians that support homosexuality?  If fundies want to make gay marriage illegal, they are going against the majority of Christians.

Any churches that choose to remain bigoted and hateful will never have to marry a homosexual couple.  Churches still get to decide which marriages they will perform.  A Protestant pastor has no obligation to perform a Jewish wedding, and a Muslim religious leader doesn’t have to marry a Catholic couple.  If I’m just being naive and religious leaders do have perform marriages that go against their beliefs, then this should be changed and they shouldn’t have to.

By only one vote, the Vermont House just voted to override Governor Douglas’s veto…

But we take heart in knowing that this [one] vote was not representative of what Vermonters understand marriage to be.

Brian Brown is also advancing another meme I already saw elsewhere. In that they are going to paint the Vermont passing of gay marriage legislation as some sort of tyranny of minority.

OM NOM NOM!

Seriously, that pie chart needs eyes, and the speech bubble should read OM NOM NOM!

stogoe FTW!!

In that they are going to paint the Vermont passing of gay marriage legislation as some sort of tyranny of minority.

The get a super-majority to over-ride and it’s going to portrayed as a minority?  Not only are the courts wrong the elected representatives are wrong too? 

Hey I know!  Let’s get an Imam (Christian Version) and we can appoint him Supreme Leader and no matter what the Legislature or Courts decide, he (it has to be a he) can override!  Betcha nobody’s thought of that yet!  Splendid Idea….I’m so proud!

catgirl—you’re not being naive, churches do not have to perform any weddings they don’t want to (and do not have to allow them to be performed in their buildings, unless they rent them out to the public regardless of denomination, in which case the law may well prevent them from discriminating against gay people.)

The get a super-majority to over-ride and it’s going to portrayed as a minority?  Not only are the courts wrong the elected representatives are wrong too?

Yep. According to Tony Perkins, it’s undemocratic unless they put it on the ballot for everyone to vote on (only for laws he disagrees with, of course.) Apparently even though this is the way our representative democracy works, if wingnuts decide something is too big a change, it can’t be done by the legislature until a majority of voters directly tell them to. And I’m sure if they do, then they’ll say the vote was rigged by Teh Gay Mafia.

So this has nothing to do with anything, but I was sort of disappointed that neither video took the line “A storm is coming” to play….oh, what’s that song?  I’m singing it—“Oooh, a storm is threatening / My very life today.”  Or at least, that’s what my mind jumped to, not this whole ZOMG Teh Gaaaayz and its subsequent debunking.

Can we pretty, pretty please use the NOM video as evidence that we desperately need to teach civics at all levels in our schools?

And wait, NOM?  Were they ignorant of lolcats before they choose their name and acronym, or did they think to fool us by invoking thoughts of cute kittens?

I had fun cranium blasting some fundiot at a public event who was trying to tell me that “my rights as a parent” were being violated.  I simply told him that it violated my religious beliefs to have my kids told that only some families exist and not others because Jesus loves everybody.

Should I add that the David Puker bullshit was actually NOT about sex or marriage, but about all the different types of families that love their children? 

I should also add that there were children in that school who had LEGALLY MARRIED parents who happen to be gay ... and who should see a family like their own included in a unit about “my family”.  Their rights would have been far more violated by exclusion if this religious bullshit was forced on all kids from all types of families.

What ever happened to “well, we don’t see it that way son”?

Magis:

one could hope that evangelicals will go back to the way they tried to convert people beofre the 70s, namely by example. This fire and the sword thing really isn’t working too well.

The biggest problem is that these people have completely lost the ability to distinguish between religious beliefs and traditions that are universal and those that are their own tradition.

My Catholic mother always made a big point of teaching us not only that such distinctions existed, but that they were our choice and not to impose on others. WE didn’t eat meat during Lent, but since that was a Catholic tradition, our Protestant neighbors weren’t bound by it at all. Similarly, while things like alcohol or caffeine weren’t an issue for us, it was wrong to try to insist or push them on someone whose tradition was different.

While she felt abortion was a universal wrong, she was just as adamant that contraception and the choice to have non-marital sex were not. Our tradition forbad them, but others had to be responsible for their own choices by their own consciences.

I grew up assuming that was how religious people thought. God, did I find out how wrong I was! I miss Mom.

Lymis, it sounds like you had a very wise mother.  I wish more people were like her.

NOM?  Seriously?  Sorry NOM-ers, but it’s hard to give much credence to any group whose name sounds like something you see on I Can Haz Cheezburger.  LOLwingnuts!

catgirl- Churches don’t even have to perform weddings for people of their OWN denomination or their own congregations. If a priest doesn’t think a couple is ready for marriage for any reason, he just refuses to marry them. End of discussion, and no lawsuits allowed.

Catholics don’t marry divorced people. (The annulment scam aside). Some Orthodox Jews don’t allow mixed marriages. Some denominations require conversion before they hold a religious marriage.

None of these things are open to lawsuits. If divorced Catholics haven’t successfully sued the church for a wedding, ain’t no gay folks going to be able to either, and these people know it. And as long as these people aren’t able to claim that their religious beliefs mean we shouldn’t be able to go downtown for a civil ceremony, it would be pretty pointless to sue a church anyway. Even if (and we can’t) we could sue to have a wedding ceremony, we couldn’t sue to be allowed membership, or even to demand the religious form of the ceremony. All we could demand is that the clergyperson be compelled to act in his or her role as a civil witness. Which we get without the lawsuit at city hall.

They are basing this on women suing to be allowed to join men’s clubs and black people suing to be allowed membership at country clubs and so on. Gay people suing a Mormon church to have a wedding would be more like a black person suing a segregated country club for the right to play golf at the public course down the street, or a woman suing a men’s club for the right to eat at the restaurant next door. What’s the point? Whatever they say, we don’t need a church to have a valid wedding. We need the laws to allow it.

Paul:

You have a point.  However, since the politicization of the Evangelicals by Ralph Reed and his ilk I have a strong feeling that it will take a series of smashing political defeats before they get the message.  The Rethugs played the God card and it worked for awhile.  These folks got used to their voices being heard all out of proportion to their numbers and will not give it up without a fight.

In fact, to the True Believer, a sense of persecution is a requirement to the paridigm.  Amanda quite often successfuly shows that they are majority claiming to be a put upon minority.  The more one suffers persecution (real or imagined) for THE TRUTH the more their sense of self-worth increases.  The True Believer gets his/her self-worth from the movement because they almost always have a terrible self-image.

i’m not entirely up on my us geography, but isn’t vermont pretty close to canada? where we have had same-sex marriage for years now? without the world ending or the sky falling or the government banning all fundie churches or anything?

i refuse to believe that all vermonters (or all americans) are as ignorant of the world outside their own borders as is popularly portrayed.

Teh Gay Mafia

Dammit, I know there’s a discussion happening here, but now all I can think of is people is sexy fedoras coming for me…  “Tonite, youse gonna sleep wit da ...OTHER WOMEN!”

Sophiefair, Vermont shares a border with Massachusetts, and is pretty heavily economically tied to MA as well, the eastern states being so small as they are.

It does not, however share a border with a Canadian province that has same gender unions.

Oops, my bad - Quebec extended marriage rights at nearly exactly the same time that Massachusetts did.

Of course the wingnuts will never want you to know this: MA has the lowest divorce rate in the US and has for every year since Goodrich.

More interesting factoids: before it was nationally decided that Canada would recognize same-sex marriages, the only holdouts among the provinces and territories were Alberta, Yukon, and Northwest Territories.

These are the three provinces with the highest divorce rates, too.

So ultimately pathetic and specious it’s not even worth commenting on.

These people are truly insane.

Completely off the topic, but are there any other Nick Cave fans who watched that video, heard the thunderclap at the beginning, and had the urge to scream “TUPELO!!”?

Just me, then.

dejah thoris:

Dear vomitous jackals of the right:  when YOUR marriages are perfect, when YOU aren’t fucking around on your spouses, raping young girls in the name of god, interfering with womens’ rights to their own bodies, and in general, when you start minding your own goddamned business, then maybe we’ll have some respect for that particularly ugly structure you adhere to called “religion.”

No, not even then, really. A happily married person doesn’t get to tell two pther people that they’re not good enough to get married, it’s just not hypocritical.