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I certainly didn’t realize I wanted to take all my own rights away.
Yes, the Republican Party has been more staunchly traditional with its views of things like gay marriage, but the premise of Republicans being “THE party of homophobia and hate” is disingenuous from MANY angles.
Fact is, this 2016 platform is barely distinguishable from the policies that the left enacted in the 90s under people like Clinton, and continued as late as Obama’s stance early in his presidency.
The left has evolved just as the right has on these issues. The parties have been a handful of years apart in this regard at most, but the left is allowed, with the help of the media, to freely shed its past with flimsy justification at best, while the crudest voices of the right are amplified and made to appear as representative of the entire party.
Even the linked NPR article admits that Trump is more moderate on these issues, and judging from the makeup of the most recent CPAC, the direction of the party towards social libertarianism with limited government involvement couldn’t be more clear.
But the media tries to prevent that progress from happening in the party, both by deceiving its readers into believing Trump is Hitler, by cherry-picking voices on the right that clearly differ from how the party has evolved, while also gaslighting its readers on the left’s own troubled past.
Secondly, the notion that every LGBTQ or other minority status must be a single issue voter hyper focused on their supposed minority identity is itself a bit offensive, yet pushed by the left.
If you face homelessness as a kid as a result of government policies, suddenly you don’t have the luxury of caring about whether you can legally marry.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually very grateful for the cultural acceptance that the left has helped push towards LGBTQ causes, amongst others.
But for all of the cultural acceptance they’ve helped achieve, they have their share of policies that I feel continue to harm.
For example, I have no interest in forcing a bakery to bake me a cake. My only interest is that I also be legally allowed to open my own bakery that openly supports everyone. But I’ve been co-opted into this fight, whether I like it or not.
Which leads me to my final point, which is the notion that every issue is so black and white that everyone neatly fits into the “good” box or the “evil” box.
Both sides have perpetrated this division for their own needs, but I refuse to play into it.
For as much as the left has helped the culture change to accept me, they have equally helped push the notion that I can’t have nuanced views of marriage, of a bakery’s choice of service, and of government assistance policies.
We’re all either marching in the parade, or we’re nazis.
This leads to the very statement you initially made - a clear, binary choice, with one side advocating for the elimination of my entire existence, and the other, a utopia of acceptance and love.
Which in turn leads to the kind of dehumanizing, violent rhetoric I hear regularly at work from the supposed side of tolerance, who remind me that it might be ok if I “came out” as LGBTQ at work, but make it abundantly clear that my job, and likely my own safety, would be at risk if I ever “came out” as a Trump supporter.
If I take their “jokes” about re-education camps and forced sterlizarion and physical beatings seriously, that is.
Sorry, long winded response, but I have few outlets and I very much appreciate your efforts towards a conversation!
Any conservative who expressed any views like that at a company where political discussion was banned would certainly be violating the political discussion policy, at the least, and potentially also violating harassment policies.
Marriage was a religious thing.
There is no reason any part of the state should mess with it.
But, for a while it so happened that it was useful for the state to rely on marriage to mean "two people living together" for whatever that should mean in tax codes etc. With that came the rules that followed the mainstream religion at the time.
Today that isn't the case any longer and it should be split.
Call the new thing what you want: around here it is something like "civil marriage" as opposed to "(implicit: religious) marriage".
The point should be to separate those two things:
- can you get the same tax benefits? Yes.
- can you throw a party to celebrate it? Yes.
- are people allowed to ask someone about it before hiring them or avoid hiring someone if they find out about it in another way? No.
- is it "religious marriage" so we can force every church to accept it? No.
Does this help?
FTR: I'm a practicing conservative Christian. I think a lot of stuff others do is wrong, and if asked directly I will have to keep silent or answer truthfully.
I do however appreciate my liberty to live my life as I want without neither the state nor anyone else interfering (coming from a non mainstream church this definitely hasn't always been the case, look up Hans Nielsen Hauge for easy access to examples of what I mean) and I want to extend that freedom to others:
If people aren't Christians I might think what they do is wrong, I don't want them to preach in my church etc but I leave them alone and hope for the favour to be returned.
Do you have sources to back that up? I'm genuinely curious. My understanding was that marriage was always a social contract, but that society and religion used to be more intertwined thus 'religious marriage'.
I don't disagree with the idea of separating the religious and civil/cultural aspects of marriage. But I think you'll find non religious folk resistant to calling civil/cultural partnerships something other than marriage. It's a deeply embedded cultural concept not just a religious concept.
That said I think my argument still stands if you replace "religious" with "cultural"?
I think the major problem here is that most conservative Christians who propose it still want “religious marriage” to count as a “civil marriage.” Fundamentally separating the two isn’t actually a bad idea in my opinion, but in practice it seems like most people who suggested it (from the conservative side of things) didn’t actually want that. They wanted “separate but equal” in a sense, and they also didn’t particularly care if it actually happened or not - it was a delaying tactic here in the US.
There's usually no problem with a religious marriage counting as a civil marriage, except for edge cases like religions who accepts polygamy etc since all the rules that are needed for civil marriage (and more) are typically also required by mainstream religions.
And religions mostly have no problem with civil marriage as long as nobody forces them to bless it. Exceptions: I guess WBC and a few others.
But it’s not even just that - if the US religious right had honestly been fine with that, then why didn’t that come to pass? That would have been a much easier thing to do than to fight marriage equality tooth and nail at every turn. The fact that they didn’t really support this obvious easy way out is very telling.
Why are we pretending like the ones asking for the rights didn’t take some obvious logical, alternate path? LGBT folks largely supported “civil unions” which were explicitly unequal, doesn’t it stand to reason they would have supported something far more equal? The answer is that LGBT people weren’t the ones refusing to take some higher road here.
People change, conservatives pride themselves on changing slower, but it does happen.
The party platform is the official stance of the Republican party and it is against same sex marriage. It won't change until 2024. Republicans who support it are extreme outliers, not the other way around.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/rnc-moves-2016-platform-inta...
> I’m pretty sure mainstream republicans are pretty onboard with accepting homosexuality
Less than half of Republicans support same sex marriage.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-mat...
If I was in a same sex marriage I would feel very, very uncomfortable working at a company that "bans politics" when a large number of my peers thinks my spouse is "unnatural".
What's especially important to remember though, is if a company were to limit political discussions, by your same statements/logic, that would also include opinions shared _against_ same sex marriage though, no?
Wouldn't that create a safer environment where 1) people are mostly insulated from people sharing their views against it, and 2) if someone were to share something about their same sex spouse, any publicly expressed opposition against it at the workplace would be considered breaking that workplace norm.
I think a lot of people want to treat this as an experiment - “couldn’t it work?” - but a lot of people with lived experience are saying “this policy doesn’t work, because this used to be how workplace policies were, and they had really bad side-effects.”
I just think most of us are unwilling to run the experiment again just because it should work. In practice, it does not.
This is exactly why I don’t want these conversations in my company’s chat channels. I am not advocating against gay marriage, but I get downvoted because I say something to the effect of “hey maybe you might have an outdated view of many of your conservative voting peers”. This despite the fact that my personal views are probably more in line with yours than you’d expect. I’m just not willing to toss half the country under a bus before I even have a conversation with them.