Profound insights from MAD on Gay Marriage

[_barrelomonkeys]

*singing* Have I told you lately that I love you????

No, and I've been DEEPLY offended. ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyIMuG5j ... ed&search=

Play it once a day from Book of Mormon. :)

[_beastie]

Play it once a day from Book of Mormon. :)

Hey, I'll play it once a day just to enjoy his hairdo. :P

So, I'm sitting here contemplating that bcspace intentionally decided to NOT quote the section where I reworded his statement using the word "possibility" and then accuses me of being "hopeless".

bcspace has demonstrated some puzzling behaviors on this thread (and on other threads) It's the type of behavior often seen on MAD, that left me scratching my head. I can't tell you how many time I interacted with believers on a particular point, usually the Book of Mormon in Mesoamerica, and saw them interpreting the language we share in an astounding fashion. I saw believers that I had long believed to be honest and decent seeming to engage in deliberate obfuscation or misleading statements. I will never, never, forget an exchange I had with Brant Gardner that, to me, kind of became the point of no return:

http://p079.ezboard.com/fpacumenispages ... =342.topic

Basically, my message to Brant was that his statements on FAIR about the "linguistic evidence" supporting the use of metal in the Book of Mormon was extraordinarily misleading, due to the fact that the linguistics only referred to simple metal from outcrops or meteorites - it had no reference to the process of metallurgy, which the Book of Mormon describes. I knew brant knew enough about ancient Mesoamerica to know this. Yet he still used the linguistics to support the Book of Mormon. I really expected him to make this clarification on FAIR, despite still hoping for future evidence. He would not.

I do not mean to pick on Brant, but this exchange was striking to me. I came away from it believing that some believers know that they are being slightly manipulative and misleading in these arguments, but justify it. It's for the Lord. It's ok to keep finding ways to help believers believe, even if the ways are a little bit misleading, because, in the end, it will be proven to be true, anyway.

bcspace is a harder case to figure out. It could be that confirmation bias is such a strong tendency in him he really doesn't realize what he's doing. I know it's hard to believe, because it's been so obvious on this thread, but it is possible.

Another possibility that occurs to me sometimes with certain extreme folks is that maybe they're pulling our legs. Can someone really be as dense as bcspace has been on this thread and still declare victory? Seriously???? :::shrugs:::

[_Zoidberg]

It's interesting BCspace claims you "came out" as a female, having not originally noticed the obvious nature of your avatar. I suppose it was a mistake of me to assume he was familiar with the female reproductive organ.

I thought he was not that familiar with female anatomy, either. Actually, I've had this little clip stuck in my head ever since: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNBSc5PD00E

[_Blixa]

This whole thread has nearly descended into the absurd! At this point, I'm just enjoying it for the entertainment value.

KA

You said a mouthful, sister (cue Bond joke). I just got home to find the thing has gone on for 11 pages!yawn*

*yawn* I had a lovely day; hope the rest of you were doing other things besides this thread....

[_Gadianton]

BCSpace,

I haven't followed this whole thread, but I've read a couple of your uh, scholarly, contributions. For the sake of argument, and remember, I haven't read every one of your posts, I will agree that homosexuality can be risky. As I've clearly admitted myself, one of my best friends just died largely because of the lifestyle he chose which was strongly linked to his homosexuality.

Let's make this real simple.

1. No one has been jailed in a long, long time for being gay. However, beastiality, pedophilia, polygamy with 14 year olds, and necrophilia will get you booked. What does that tell you? It tells you society as a whole, including Morons, I mean, Mormons, implicitly accept that homosexuality is an acceptable choice in life, one that, unlike doing hard drugs and screwing rabbits, has a place in a free society. One that is even MORE ACCEPTABLE TO Mormons, than the lifestyle their own founding prophets practiced.

2. Given (1), that homosexuality has a minimum toleration in that it is not punished by law, and given that it is risky, what is the best course of action for right-thinkin' people that read bibles or wear magic underwear?

a) Rant and rave about the evil of homosexuality, allow people to be gay, but terrorize their lifestyle as much as possible; make it clear they barely qualify as human and so on. and deny them any support or blessings. As Pastor Lowry put it today on Christian radio, Soddom and Gomorrah didn't even legalize gay marraige. They apparently had no problem with homosexual rape, but they didn't stoop to allowing same-sex people to try and love and respect each other in a commited relationship. Let's continue to make stupid insights like these and feel good about ourselves

b) Support their decision the best we can and try to get them in a position where their lifestyle is a little less risky.

We might want to further ask ourselves, as non-drinking Mormons, since we don't jail people for drinking shall we:

a) give no support to a drinking friend, refuse to drive him home, demand the only solution be AA or dogmatic abstainance, and when we he gets in that car, he gets in there with us quoting the doctrine and covenants or condemning his sin. When he crashes and dies, we wash our hands and relish another statistic that we naïvely thinks supports a god-breathed commandment.

b) Give the guy a ride home and encourage him to drink more responsible in the future. Let him know, that we're there for him, even if he slips and if necessary will pick him up again at 4 a.m..

[_Livingstone22]

[...]

1. No one has been jailed in a long, long time for being gay. However, beastiality, pedophilia, polygamy with 14 year olds, and necrophilia will get you booked. What does that tell you? It tells you society as a whole, including Morons, I mean, Mormons, implicitly accept that homosexuality is an acceptable choice in life, one that, unlike doing hard drugs and screwing rabbits, has a place in a free society. One that is even MORE ACCEPTABLE TO Mormons, than the lifestyle their own founding prophets practiced.

[...]

Adult consensual homosexual practices, oral sexual practices, interracial sexual practices, cohabitation, and adult consensual polygamy are not prosecuted anymore at all. It is not that the nation is going down immorally or that there is a sliding scale that will soon allow bestiality, pedophilia, etc...it is the libertarian ideals first set out by people like John Locke, John Stewart Mill, and Thomas Jefferson that have taken root and grown in the affluent, industrial societies of Western Europe and America. These societies have been breeding grounds for an educated populace and democratic ideologies. Largely, the fundamentalist, superstitious societies of some parts of the world still rely on ancient religious thought to be the final authority--differing ideas are silenced, freedoms are taken away, and people devote their lives to irrational practices (like flying planes into buildings, and killing in the name of fear). We, as Americans cannot let our country be taken over by absolutist concepts and world-views--how would you like to live in a country like Iran, where fundamentalist religious law is state law? It may be great if you are part of that fundamentalist religion, but sure sucks if you're not.

[_beastie]

One of the ironies on this thread was bcspace's insistence that one cannot rightfully separate out the impact of prejudicial behavior* when attempting to ascertain the self-destructive nature of homosexuality is that every single time any critic on MAD brings up how depressed and generally unhappy polygamous women were in the early LDS culture, we are told that we cannot rely on that as proof that the women were engaging in behavior that they would rather have not chosen because a great deal of that depression and unhappiness was rather the result of the prejudicial behavior of larger society.

Just one more example of how hypocritical it is, in my opinion, for the LDS to be so aggressively anti-gay marriage, when their a large part of their own early history was built on persecution suffered due to an alternate and unpopular marital choice.

*So Matthew Sheppard's death, in bcspace's paradigm, could be viewed as an example of how self destructive the "gay lifestyle" is, and used as a statistic to prove people ought not to "choose" to be gay, and society ought not to give moral approbation to the "choice" by allowing them to get married

As I've said before, I believe that when the current teenage generation has political power, gay marriage will not only be legalized but the heated debate our generation has had about it will be viewed exactly like the heated debates some folks use to have about desegregation. They just don't seem to be as threatened by it as my generation - I believe due to the fact that so many homosexuals have chosen to live openly and proudly. Change is slow and painful, but it is coming, and one day bcspace's words would be viewed with embarrassment by his possible descendants. And, of course, the LDS church will be defended by future apologists who accuse critics of engaging in "presentism".

[_A Light in the Darkness]

Sadly, BCSpace is cherry picking quotes from studies, some legitimate, some not, that are compiled on popular conservative apologetics sites with an agenda against homosexuality. As a result, the statistical realities surrounding homosexuality in America becomes clouded. An unfortunate consequence of this is that the legitimate numbers BCSpace references lose crediblity in the eyes of those skeptical of anything he would say. As far as the challenge to my claim that lesbians have more sexual partners on average than heterosexuals is concerned, the reality is a bit more complex. It has to do with the fact that how "lesbian" is defined for research purposes can vary. More specifically, exclusively lesbian individuals tend to have about the same amount of sexual partners on average as heterosexuals and more than hetereosexual women alone. In other words, they are no more promiscuous than men and women together, but are about twice as promiscuous as their hetero gender counterpart. They're less promiscuous than hetero men. However, a significant % of the population has some bisexual tendencies, and if you define lesbian as "near exclusively attracted to women" or "predominately attracted to women" (Adding in 5's and possibly 4's from the Kinsey Scale) you end up with higher promiscuity numbers. It turns out that bisexual tendencies positively correlates with promiscuity. As a result the research offers a range in numbers based on some subtle distinctions.

[_beastie]

It turns out that bisexual tendencies positively correlates with promiscuity.

Considering that the base of available sexual partners is doubled for bisexuals, that's not surprising.

[_KimberlyAnn]

It's interesting BCspace claims you "came out" as a female, having not originally noticed the obvious nature of your avatar. I suppose it was a mistake of me to assume he was familiar with the female reproductive organ.

I thought he was not that familiar with female anatomy, either. Actually, I've had this little clip stuck in my head ever since: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNBSc5PD00E

ROFL!

Poor BCspace. I'm just sad the public school system failed him so badly.

KA